Perioperative anesthesia and pain management are among the difficult situations for anesthesiologists to manage in kidney transplant patients. These patients are often complicated by comorbidities related to chronic kidney disease. The main issues in postoperative pain management for kidney transplant patients include dose adjustment, prevention of further renal damage, and maintenance of graft perfusion. Pain management in patients with end-stage renal disease may be inadequate due to limited options of systemic analgesics. In addition, regional analgesia techniques can be considered to avoid the adverse effects of anesthetics and systemic analgesics (1). Erector spinae plane block (ESPB) is a regional fascial plane block method developed in recent years. In this method, analgesia is provided by injecting local anesthetic between the transverse process and the erector spinae muscles and anesthetizing the dorsal and ventral branches of the regional spinal nerves. It has a wide range of applications including thoracic, lumbar, and thoracic and abdominal surgeries (2,3). Transmuscular quadratus lumborum block (TMQLB) is a nerve block technique in which local anesthetic is applied to the fascial plane between the psoas major (PM) and quadratus lumborum (QL) muscles. Anatomical evidence has shown that local anesthetic can spread through the thoracolumbar fascia into the thoracic paravertebral space, thus infiltrating the thoracic spinal nerves and sympathetic trunk, providing both somatic and visceral analgesia for abdominal surgery (4). This study aims to evaluate the analgesic efficacy of ESPB and TMQLB in terms of pain management after kidney transplantation. The primary aim of the study was to evaluate pain scores and analgesic consumption between groups in the 24-hour postoperative period. The secondary aim was to evaluate the time to first analgesic requirement after block, the number of patients requiring analgesics, and the levels of nausea and vomiting.
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evaluate pain scores and analgesic consumption between groups
Timeframe: postoperative 24 hours