Introduction:

Preventive analgesia is the administration of a drug or performance of an intervention capable of inhibiting or blocking the painful response in order to prevent the pain associated with a surgical procedure.

Objective:

To identify whether there are differences in postoperative pain control using preventive analgesia versus postoperative analgesia, managed with paracetamol + ketorolac in patients undergoing elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy.

Material and methods:

Controlled clinical trial, randomized, longitudinal, unicentric, prolective, homodemic, double blind; 70 patients divided into two groups. group 1 received preventive analgesia using paracetamol + ketorolac and group 2 same scheme in an immediate postsurgical manner. Bloodpressure, heartrate, numerical verbal scale of pain and presence of side effects of drugs at different times were measured. Student’s t-test with statistical significance of p < 0.05.

Results:

At 60 minutes the diastolic blood pressure in group 1 had difference of means -4.20 with p = 0.027 and numerical verbal scale presented difference of means of -0.71 and p = 0.002. At four hours diastolic bloodpressure showed difference of means of -3.5 and p = 0.033. Nausea was reported in 2.9% for group 1 and 8.6% for group 2.

Conclusions:

There is a better response to pain in those patients who receive a preventive analgesia scheme compared to those who are administered an immediate post-surgical analgesia scheme.