The Influence of Different Anesthesia and Postoperative Pain Management on Acute and Chronic Postsurgical Pain After Thoracic Surgery: a Prospective Study

Chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP) was the pain caused by the operation that exceeded the healing time of normal tissue (usually 3 months), that was, a status that the damage caused by noxious stimulus had been healed, but the pain that cannot be explained by disease and inflammation were still existed. Due to the location of the incision and the necessity of indwelling the chest tube, the thoracic lung surgery was considered to be one of the most painful surgical operations. Studies have found that the incidences of CPSP in patients with thoracotomy were 57% (95% CI, 51-64%) and 47% (95% CI, 39-56%) at postoperative 3 and 6 months, respectively. With the development of minimally invasive techniques, thoracic surgery had gradually become less traumatic, and the number of surgical incisions was gradually developed into single port.Through ages, epidural analgesia with a combination of local anesthetics and opioids had long been considered the "gold standard" for postoperative analgesia in thoracic surgery. However, with the development of clinical anesthetics and the widespread use of nerve block techniques, it had been found that in open radical gastrectomy, there was no significant difference in the inhibition of intraoperative stress response between dexmedetomidine combined with general anesthesia and a combined general-epidural anesthesia. So, which anesthesia and analgesia method was "perfect" for a specific type of surgery procedure? This study would compare acute and chronic postsurgical pain in patients underwent different thoracic surgery procedure with different anesthesia and analgesia methods, and explore the influencing factors.