Use of local wound infiltration in open hepatectomy to reduce wound pain: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

The aim of this study was to assess the effects of local wound infiltration anaesthesia on postoperative wound pain in patients undergoing open liver resection. The Cochrane Library, PubMed, EMBASE, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM) and Wanfang databases were searched. The search period spanned from database creation to December 2022. All relevant studies on local wound infiltration anaesthesia for analgesia after hepatectomy were included. Two investigators independently screened the literature, extracted data and evaluated the quality of each study. Review Manager (RevMan) 5.4 software (Cochrane Collaboration) was used for the meta‐analysis, in which 12 studies with 986 patients were included. The results show that local wound infiltration anaesthesia effectively reduced surgical site wound pain at 4 h (mean difference [MD]: −1.26, 95% confidence intervals [CIs]: −2.15 to −0.37, P = .005), 12 h (MD: −0.84, 95% CIs: −1.26 to −0.42, P < .001), 24 h (MD: −0.57, 95% CIs: −1.01 to −0.14, P = .009) and 48 h (MD: −0.54, 95% CIs: −0.81 to −0.26, P < .001) postoperatively; however, there was no significant difference in analgesia at 72 h postoperatively (MD: −0.10, 95% CIs: −0.80 to 0.59, P = .77). These findings suggest that local wound infiltration anaesthesia administered to patients undergoing open liver resection provides good postoperative wound analgesia at the surgical site.