Adductor canal block with or without added magnesium sulfate following total knee arthroplasty: a multi-arm randomized controlled trial.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Postoperative analgesia following total knee arthroplasty (TKA) often includes intrathecal opioids, periarticular injection (PAI) of local anesthetic, systemic multimodal analgesia, and/or peripheral nerve blockade.

The adductor canal block (ACB) provides analgesia without muscle weakness and magnesium sulphate (MgSO4) may extend its duration.

The purpose of this trial was to compare the duration and quality of early post-TKA analgesia in patients receiving postoperative ACB (± MgSO4) in addition to standard care.

Why It Was Studied

Www.clinicaltrials.gov (NCT02581683); registered 21 October 2015.

Who Took Part

Elective TKA patients were randomized to: 1) sham ACB, 2) ropivacaine ACB, or 3) ropivacaine ACB with added MgSO4.

Patients and assessors remained blinded to allocation.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

All received spinal anesthesia with intrathecal morphine, intraoperative PAI, and multimodal systemic analgesia.

Anesthesiologists knew whether patients had received sham or ACB but were blinded to MgSO4.

The primary outcome was time to first analgesic (via patient-controlled analgesia [PCA] with iv morphine) following ACB.

Secondary outcomes were morphine consumption, side effects, visual analogue scale pain scores, satisfaction until 24 hr postoperatively, and length of stay.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Analgesics, Opioid, Anesthetics, Local, Arthroplasty, Replacement, Knee, Magnesium Sulfate, Nerve Block and Postoperative Pain.

The authors tagged it with the keywords adductor canal block, analgesia / methods, nerve block / methods and saphenous nerve.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2021 (Canadian journal of anaesthesia = Journal canadien d'anesthesie), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.