COMPARISON OF ULTRASOUND GUIDED LUMBAR ERECTOR SPINAE BLOCK WITH TRANSVERSUS ABDOMINIS PLANE BLOCK FOR POST-OPERATIVE ANALGESIA IN INGUINAL HERNIA REPAIR: A RANDOMISED CONTROL STUDY

The benefits of good postoperative analgesia include reduction in the postoperative stress response and morbidity, better patient satisfaction, early ambulation, early discharge from post-operative care unit, early discharge in day care surgeries and improved outcome. And also adequate post-operative analgesia will reduce overall complications, including respiratory.

Most of the patients coming for inguinal hernia repair are in elderly age group, who deserve adequate post-operative analgesia. Because in these age group often they have other co morbidities like diabetes mellitus, hypertension.

Inguinal hernia repair can lead to significant post-operative pain. Non opioid analgesia techniques are especially important in aging populations when co-morbidities are considered.

Erector Spinae Plane block (ESPB), first described for analgesia in thoracic neuropathic pain has also been reported for the management of other causes of acute and postoperative pain. In this ultrasound-guided (USG) technique, local anesthetic is applied between the erector spinae muscle and the transverse process of the vertebra leading to spread of local anaesthetic cephalad, caudally and also through the paravertebral space.

The Transversus abdominis plane (TAP) block is an alternate, easy to perform, and an effectiveperipheral abdominal field block that blocks the ilioinguinal, hypogastric and lower intercostal(T7–T11) nerves. TAP block is a novel technique for blocking the abdominal wall neural afferents via the lumbar triangle of Petit.

This study is going to establish Effectiveness of LumbarErector Spinae Block (L-ESPB) and Transversus Abdominis Plane (TAP) blocks in post-operative analgesia after inguinal hernia repair, which will be going to help us practice good multimodal analgesia in the post-operative period.