Speeding Recovery From Pain and Opioid Use

Surgical treatment of breast cancer is associated with significant disability, and pain is often reported as a primary cause for declines in the ability to perform activities of daily living. Surgical treatments can also negatively influence social exposure and alter self-perception and sexual health. Reconstruction of the breast mound following mastectomy has several benefits in psychosocial functioning, body image and satisfaction with breast appearance, and sexual well-being. However, reconstruction at the same time as mastectomy has been linked to higher postoperative pain. Compared to autologous breast reconstruction, implant based techniques have been linked to higher requirements of postoperative nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, opioids, and benzodiazepines as well as higher pain scores in the immediate postoperative period and one year after surgery. Recent publications report that intensity of pain in the operative area prior to surgery, body mass index (BMI), presence of axillary operation, intensity of acute postoperative pain, and amount of opioid required to achieve satisfactory analgesia in the acute postoperative period are also risk factors for persistent pain following breast cancer surgery (PPBCS). Since severity of acute postoperative pain is consistently observed as a risk factor for persistent pain, there has been interest in determining whether better acute pain control reduces this risk. Infiltration of the surgical site with bupivacaine decreases intraoperative and postoperative narcotic use, and has been associated with decreased pain scores in the immediate postoperative period. A novel approach to hemithoracic analgesia has been introduced which proposed less risk of anatomic trespass by doing a local anesthetic injection into the fascial planes of the chest wall. These procedures have demonstrated improved analgesia for breast surgeries. Unfortunately, there is a lack of large, multicenter, prospective, and randomized trials comparing these analgesic modalities and evaluating the response to these acute postoperative analgesic interventions with regard to PPBCS and other metrics of daily function, satisfaction with pain control, and self-perception of well-being and predictors of recovery from the pain state. The goals of this research are to provide short-term surrogate measures for prevention or treatment trials and to develop methods enabling practitioners to forecast recovery in real-time and that are translatable to patients in understandable references regarding risk over time.