Pain Medication Prescribing Patterns in Augmentation Mammoplasty

BACKGROUND: The rate of opioid prescribing after low-risk surgical procedures has increased over the past decade, and surgeons are responsible for prescribing approximately one-third of all opioid medications. There is additional supporting evidence that patients only consume about half of the opioids prescribed to them after outpatient plastic surgery. Currently, there is no literature to provide surgeons with reference ranges for how much opioid medication will adequately provide analgesia for patients after undergoing bilateral breast augmentation (BBA) surgery. OBJECTIVE: To quantify the amount of opioid medication required to adequately control pain for patients after undergoing BBA and use these data to provide recommendations on opioid prescribing practices. METHODS: Cross-sectional prospective data were obtained through a take-home medication and pain tracking questionnaire for 56 patients after they underwent either subpectoral or subglandular BBA. Patients documented their pain scores on a 0 to 10 analogue scale and documented the type and amount of pain medication they took for a 7-day period. RESULTS: Our study demonstrated that patients in the subglandular BBA group required an average of either 25 ± 1.2 Tylenol #3 or 19.3 ± 2.3 Tramacet tablets, and the subpectoral group required 27.7 ± 1.7 Tylenol #3 or 25.6 ± 0.9 Tramacet tablets over a 7-day period. There was no statistically significant difference between the 2 surgical groups. CONCLUSION: We propose a reference range of medication required on average for patients undergoing BBA to obtain adequate pain control in the initial postoperative period that falls within the most recent Canadian guidelines for safe opioid prescribing practices.