Postoperative Pain Management: Role of Dexmedetomidine as an Adjuvant

Acute postoperative pain remains one of the major challenges of pain medicine. Although various methods and drugs have been proposed to manage perioperative pain, oral and intravenous opioid analgesics are still among the most common medications. However, their potential short- and long-term adverse effects can limit their application (1). Also, an increase in the dose of opioids during surgery may not always result in better postoperative painmanagement, and there are concerns about the faster onset and higher severity of acute postoperative pain, known as opioid-induced hyperalgesia (2). To reduce the consumption of perioperative opioids, various drugs and methods have been studied to date, including non-opioids, adjuvants, and regional, peripheral, and neuraxial blocks. Nevertheless, the application of each of these methods and drugs requires specific knowledge, experience, equipment, arrangements, and care (3- 7). Many clinical studies have been published on the application of multimodal analgesia in a variety of surgeries. In these studies, the addition of adjuvants to opioids in patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) or to local anesthetics in peripheral and neuraxial nerve blocks was common (8, 9).