Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Medicine - Department of Anaesthesia

While opioids are commonly used for postoperative analgesia, the use of these medications is associated with significant side effects that include: nausea, vomiting, dizziness, constipation, hypoventilation up to respiratory depression, prolonged recovery room stay, increased healthcare burden and decreased patient satisfaction.(²) Consequently, the use of a regional anesthetic technique, as a part of a multimodal analgesic plan, aiming at reducing postoperative opioid consumption would be advantageous. One of these techniques that can be used is lumbar paravertebral block. The paravertebral block is a regional anesthetic technique that provides ipsilateral anesthesia and analgesia resulting in somatic and sympathetic blockade in a continuous dermatomal manner. It was first performed in early 1900s with the aim of providing analgesia for abdominal surgery(³). It is now an established technique and can be used to provide analgesia for acute and chronic pain conditions of thorax and abdomen(⁴,⁵). The benefits are well documented(⁶) with analgesic qualities comparable to epidural anesthesia, which is often seen as the 2gold standard3 for analgesia of thorax and abdomen(⁷). The block can be performed unilaterally, bilaterally, as a single injection, or with a continuous catheter technique. Before the use of ultrasound, the landmark technique was adopted, but this has more recently been superseded ultrasound-guided techniques(⁸)

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