May 9, 2017
Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush is the 2017 winner of the “Best Paper” award at the recently concluded meeting of the International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery (ISASS). Their paper tackled the tough question of: does a higher ASA (American Society of Anesthesiologists) score mean more pain and narcotics use after spinal fusion?
Their answer: not necessarily.
Ankur Narain, research coordinator for Kern Singh, M.D., was first author on the unpublished paper, “Inpatient Pain Scores and Narcotic Utilization Based on American Society of Anesthesiologists Score after Cervical and Lumbar Spinal Fusion.”
In a recent Orthopedics This Week article, Narain says, “Our research group is very interested in patient pain and postoperative narcotics consumption, as issues regarding narcotics dependence are increasingly prevalent. We thought it would be interesting to perform a study examining if a relationship existed between the ASA classification and postoperative pain and narcotics use during a patient's inpatient stay after spinal fusion procedures.”
