Correlation between Surgical Pleth Index and acute postoperative pain in the recovery room

None listed

Surgical Pleth Index (SPI, GE Healthcare) has been suggested to be a potentially useful parameter to assess the depth of analgesia (freedom of pain) in patients under general anaesthesia. SPI is completely risk free and requires no extra monitoring as is simply uses existing data from standard anaesthesia monitoring (from peripheral oxygen saturation sensor) to calculate a 0-100 analgesia score. Though experiments have shown that SPI scores may “respond” (i.e. going up with a painful stimulus), it is unclear whether the score may be useful to predict acute postoperative pain the recovery room. Aim of this purely observational study is to monitor SPI in 70 patients scheduled for elective surgery and to observe and record SPI data during the last approx.15 minutes of surgery until the patient wakes up from anaesthesia. This data will be compared with the first 15 minutes of 3-minutely assessed postoperative pain (0-10 numeric rating scale) in the recovery room (time counting from when patients are capable of pain self-rating). All assessments of interest for this study are standard practice of intraoperative monitoring and no additional monitoring is required for this study. The sole difference to standard practice is that the data from the anaesthesia monitor will be downloaded onto a laptop PC for analysis of the correlation between SPI and postoperative acute pain scores