Three artificial intelligence methods can be used to predict who would be in the most pain after surgery. These new data make it possible to identify patients who could use opioids to relieve their pain.
- American scientists claim to have identified the 5 most influential factors on the appearance of severe post-surgical pain: younger age, higher body mass index, female sex, pre-existing pain and previous use of opioids.
- American scientists claim to have identified the 5 most influential factors on the onset of intense post-surgical pain: young age, high BMI, female sex, pre-existing pain and previous use of opioids.
- To obtain these results, they developed artificial intelligence software that crossed pre-selected factors with the medical records of nearly 6,000 patients, 22% of whom suffered from severe pain.
- Predicting intense post-surgical pain should allow anesthesiologists to favor non-opioid methods to avoid any risk of dependence after the operation.
Predict pain to avoid opioid addictions. This is the bet of American researchers whose study on how to predict them was presented during the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiology which took place between October 2 and 5. These scientists claim to have found a way to predict the onset of post-surgical pain using artificial intelligence. They hope that by knowing which patients are most likely to develop severe post-surgical pain, anesthesiologists will make more use of other alternatives to opioids such as nerve blocks (locally anesthetizing nerves), epidurals (anesthetizing the epidural space often used during childbirth) or other medications. Thus, the less this type of patient is exposed to opioids, the lower the risk of developing an addiction.
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