Systemic Lidocaine Infusion for Pain Control in Ventral Hernia

Patients presenting to the surgical clinic for elective repair of ventral hernia defects will be offered the opportunity to participate in a study that aims to reduce post-operative pain. Benefits and risks will be discussed with the patient, and the patient will understand that their decision to opt in or opt out will not affect the minimum standard of care. Once agreeable, the patient will undergo pre-infusion assessment. Such pre-operative evaluation will include complete pain history, quantitative pain assessment, medical history, physical exam, electrocardiogram, and laboratory workup. Specific workup will focus on heart failure or liver disease, as these increase the toxicity of lidocaine. Nevertheless, the low dose of infusion planned is not contraindicated with heart or liver disease. Patients will then be assigned equally and randomly to experimental and control groups. Physicians will be blinded from these assignments. The experimental patient will be treated with IV lidocaine bolus of 1.5 mg/kg and thereafter with infusion at 0.5 mg/kg/hour. Infusion will begin at least one hour prior to incision and continued for 24 hours after incision, unless adverse reactions experienced. Post-operative pain in eight-hour increments will be recorded. Additional opiates required to control pain during admission and after discharge will be recorded. Length of hospital stay will also be documented. The electronic medical record will be utilized to collect the below parameters. The control group will receive standard of care, along with placebo volume and rate of administration of saline equivalent to the volume and rate of the lidocaine infusion. To monitor inpatient pain medication, each patient in the control and experimental group will be prescribed the same analgesia PRN orders. The MAR feature in the electronic patient record will allow determination of the amount of PRN pain medication doses required by each patient. Physicians will be blinded and continue to adjust pain medication orders as needed for optimal patient care. Narcotic requirements for each patient can be standardized to morphine equivalents for analysis.

To monitor outpatient pain medication, each patient in the control and experiential group upon discharge will be given the same analgesia prescriptions, e.g. oxy 5 mg dips #30. Patients will bring back their bottles of pills to be counted at the 2-week post-operative visit. The investigators will call patients at the 30th post-operative day to see how much of the pain medication is in continued use.