Effectiveness of Adding Transverse Abdominus Plane (TAP) Catheter Blocks to Patient-controlled Analgesia (PCA) in Laparoscopic Colon Resections: a Prospective, Randomized Controlled Study

The control of postoperative pain has become a major issue in surgery awareness and it is considered an important measurement of patient satisfaction. Improvements in pain relief, including stopping pain before it starts (i.e. preemptive treatment) is of great benefit to the surgical patient. When pain is aggressively addressed, patients respond by recovering faster.

The use of opioids remains the mainstay to minimize postoperative pain. Lately, long acting local anesthetic wound infiltration has been widely recognized as a useful adjunct to multimodal postoperative pain management. On that basis, a system that delivers a continuous local anesthetic to the surgical wound was developed, and better pain control has been achieved after several surgical procedures.

In patients undergoing abdominal procedures, such as colon resection, adequate pain control remains an issue. It is known that innervation to the antero-lateral abdomen is provided by sensory nerves T7-L1, ilioinguinal and iliohypogastric nerves, which travel through the transverse abdominis muscle plane (TAP). Local anesthetic block of these nerves has been described and has shown to be effective for immediate postoperative pain control.

Recently, the use of the On-Q pain relief system with catheters placed within the TAP has been evaluated. Published results have shown significant improvement of pain control (Forastiere). The idea of placing the pain catheters at the TAP plane seems to be more coherent with the anatomical distribution of the sensory nerves trunks. Due to the lack of prospective trials investigating the effectiveness of a continuous wound infusion with local anesthetics after general surgery procedures the investigators sought to determine the efficacy of this technique after laparoscopic colon resection procedures.