Analgesia
Pain in animal experimentation is a major welfare issue, which must be minimized for ethical and legal reasons. Additionally, unrelieved pain may have substantial and poorly controllable effects.
Pain management includes the choice of anesthesia and analgesia agents, their dose, administration method, duration and frequency of treatment, and a pain-monitoring scheme for each individual animal.
The optimal analgesia protocol should relieve pain reliably and lack side effects that might hamper science and animal welfare. In case of surgical or painful procedures, preventive analgesia, defined as pre-, intra- and post-operative analgesia, must be planned to efficiently cover the temporal development of pain and the estimated intensity.
Pre-emptive analgesia
Pre-emptive analgesia is the administration of an analgetic drug before the nociceptive insult to reduce sensitization of the pain pathways. This procedure is widely recommended when pain is expected during and after surgical or other invasive procedures because many anesthesia agents, such as isoflurane, do not induce analgesia. Pre-emptive analgesia has the potential to be more effective than a similar analgetic treatment initiated after surgery and to reduce the required analgesia dose.
Local anesthesia
Multimodal analgesia
Multimodal analgesia is a concept that involves different classes of analgetics and/or different sites of drug administration. Administering a combination of two or more drugs with well-established, possibly complementary, pharmacokinetics and mechanism of action has been shown to result in a synergistic or additive effect.
--PJirkof 09:01, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
