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P149 A case series on the analgesic effect of thoracolumbar interfascial plane block in lumbar spine surgeries

rapm · 2025-09-10 · canonical JSON source

9 visible annotations · policy: published · automated confidence ≥ 75.00%

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Background and Aims Lower back pain is quite common in the Philippines. In 2014,35% of the occupational diseases reported involved back pain. Lumbar spine surgeries are advised and performed to alleviate this problem. Unfortunately, the pain up to three days after the surgery is relatively intense. Performance of regional anesthesia would greatly help to resolve the pain avoiding side effects secondary to opioids.Methods This paper presents three cases where patients underwent lumbar spine surgeries. Thoracolumbar interfascial plane(TLIP) block was executed after intubation. A volume of 15 ml Isobaric Bupivacaine 0.25% was injected between the multifidus and longissimus muscles, and another 5 mL was injected superficial to the posterior thoracolumbar fascia both containing 1:400,000 Epinephrine. All patients were given Paracetamol and Ketorolac for 24 hours, and shifted to oral pain medications thereafter. A rescue dose of Tramadol 50 mg IV every six hours may be given should the VAS score be above 5/10. Two of the patients had a VAS score 0–1 and were able to ambulate within 24 hours. They were discharged on the second postoperative day. These patients didn’t require any additional opioid. The third patient, however, required three rescue doses to relieve his pain from a VAS score 5–8 to 2 within the first 24 hours. This can be attributed to the more extensive fusion procedure. The patient was able to ambulate on the second postoperative day and was discharged the next day.Results TLIP blocks the dorsal rami of the thoracolumbar nerves without affecting the ventral rami and it does not cause motor block. It can provide analgesia decreasing the need for opioids leading to lesser side effects. It also enables the patient to ambulate early resulting in shorter length of hospital stay.Conclusions TLIP is a promising technique for analgesia after spine surgery, offering effective pain relief which potentially alleviates the complications secondary to opioids.