Postoperative Pain Alleviation in Open Heart Surgery

Effective pain relief after cardiac surgery has assumed importance with the introduction of fast track discharge protocols that requires early weaning from mechanical ventilation. Inadequate pain control reduces the capacity to cough, mobility, increases the frequency of atelectasis, and prolongs recovery.

A major cause of pain after cardiac surgery is the median sternotomy particularly on the first two postoperative days.

The most often used analgesics in these patients are parenteral opioids which can lead to undesirable side-effects as sedation, respiratory depression, nausea, and vomiting.

Infiltration of local anesthetics near the surgical wound has shown to improve early postoperative pain in various surgical procedures.

Magnesium is the fourth most plentiful cation in our body. It has antinociceptive effects in animal and human models of pain.

It has been mentioned in a systematic review that it may be worthwhile to further study the role of supplemental magnesium in providing perioperative analgesia, because this is a relatively harmless molecule, is not expensive and also because the biological basis for its potential antinociceptive effect is promising.

These effects are primarily based on physiological calcium antagonism, that is voltage-dependent regulation of calcium influx into the cell, and noncompetitive antagonism of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors.

there is a need to evaluate and compare local magnesium with bupivacaine , in comparison to bupivacain ,and other conventional intarvenous analgesics