A commentary on ‘Effectiveness of local anesthetic application methods in postoperative pain control in laparoscopic cholecystectomies; a randomised controlled trial’

Abstract

It was with great interest that we read the article published in the International Journal of Surgery in 2022. The authors observed the effectiveness of local anesthetic injection (LAI), abdominal local anesthesia injection (IPLA), and transabdominal plane block (TAPB), and no local anesthetic controls on post-operative pain, and compared the analgesic ef fi cacy of these methods [1] . The results showed that intraoperative local anesthesia can effectively control postoperative pain, especially TAPB can better manage postoperative pain. Many aspects of this study are well done. The authors conducted a double-blind, randomized controlled study. They had 160 patients who underwent laparoscopic cholecystectomy for cholecystitis and used statistical analysis to rule out confounding factors that might in fl uence postoperative pain, such as age, gender, previous operations, body mass index and number of trocars. In addition, they openly discussed the limitations of their study. All of these are advantages of research design. We can learn from their examples. However, we believe that there are several important questions in this study that are not well addressed. The authors