Local Anesthetic and Regional Anesthesia: An Update Information and Future Prospects

Opioids are important for perioperative pain management due to their powerful analgesic effects, but attempts have been made to reduce opioid use through a combination of multimodal analgesia, due to the need for strict drug management, opioid induced hyperalgesia and gastrointestinal motion suppression, or the abuse of medical opioids. For this reason, local anesthesia using local anesthetics has recently attracted much attention. Compared with opioids, regional anesthesia with local anesthetics has a strong analgesic effect, and suppresses surgical stress, does not suppress respiration nor postoperative gastrointestinal motility. Furthermore, the choice of anesthesia method may affect patient prognosis because of the anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor effects of regional anesthesia with local anesthetics. The results of a large prospective study are awaited in the future to clarify clinical studies on the prognosis of tumor patients in veterinary medicine.