Author(s)

Mohit Garg¹, Piyush Gupta¹, Kevin Kang², Avichai Dukshtein¹, Dennis Feierman¹

¹Department of Anesthesiology, Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA.
²Department of Orthopedics, Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Achieving adequate control of postsurgical pain remains a challenge in patients undergoing Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA). The objective of this study was to assess if liposomal bupivacaine injected into the posterior capsule, in combination with a femoral nerve block and multimodal pain control regimen, would result in better pain control. The two groups were similar with regards to demographics and method of intraoperative anesthesia. Infiltration into the posterior capsule with liposomal bupivacaine had significantly lower resting pain scores compared to the saline group. Patients in the liposomal bupivacaine group also used slightly less breakthrough narcotic (5.75 to 4.31 mg of morphine equivalence). We recommend the use of infiltration of liposomal bupivacaine into the posterior capsule as an adjunct in multimodal analgesia in TKA patients to reduce pain and resultant narcotic use.

Liposomal Bupivacaine, Exparel, Knee Arthroplasty

Garg, M. , Gupta, P. , Kang, K. , Dukshtein, A. and Feierman, D. (2017) Evaluation of the Efficacy of Liposomal Bupivacaine Infiltrated into the Posterior Capsule for Postoperative Analgesia after Total Knee Arthroplasty—A Randomized Double Blind Clinical Trial. Open Journal of Anesthesiology, 7, 381-392. doi: 10.4236/ojanes.2017.711039.