New Pain Killer for Joint Replacement

More than half of all adults in the U.S. who are diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis will undergo knee replacement surgery, according to a Workers Compensation estimate. While the surgical techniques have continued to improve, pain control has not.

A study at Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, Michigan, found that if doctors injected a newer, long-acting medicine called liposomal bupivacaine into the tissue surrounding the knee during surgery patients felt dramatically less pain. Jason Davis, M.D., a Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital joint replacement surgeon and the study’s senior author said, “Patients had pain relief for up to two days after surgery and better knee function compared with the traditional method.”

In the Henry Ford study, researchers evaluated 216 patients for pain control during the first two days after joint replacement surgery. Researchers gave half of the patients the traditional pain control which involves a continuous femoral nerve blockade. Doctors injected numbing medicine into the groin area which blunts the main nerve down the front of the knee. This caused some patients leg weakness. “Pain control came at the price of weakness and made patients somewhat tentative when walking during their hospital stay, ” Davis said.

Researchers gave the other half of the patient group an injection of liposomal bupivacaine at the site of the surgery. Davis reports that many of these patients were able to walk comfortably within hours after surgery. He observed that, “function-wise, it was a lot easier for patients to move around more confidently. This option is a promising, viable one for our patients, ” he concluded.