Why carry out this study?

Adding adjuvants to local wound infiltration (LWI) provides long analgesic duration with fewer adverse effects. However, there is no high-quality evidence for comparison of the clinical effects of nalbuphine and ketorolac as an adjuvant to LWI in patients undergoing open colorectal cancer surgery.

We hypothesized that both nalbuphine and ketorolac as an adjuvant for LWI would contribute to more outstanding results in prolonging postoperative analgesia and relieving acute pain than ropivacaine alone, and that ketorolac would be more effective in reducing acute postoperative pain than nalbuphine.

What was learned from the study?

The results showed that both nalbuphine and ketorolac infiltration prolonged the duration of analgesia and reduced morphine consumption compared with ropivacaine alone after open colorectal surgery.

The results of the present study suggest that ketorolac infiltration did not result in a clinically important improvement over nalbuphine infiltration.

Generally, the infiltration of these agents (nalbuphine and ketorolac) appears to be safe, but the results should be interpreted with caution as exploratory outcomes.