Safety and Efficacy of the Use of Intrathecal Morphine for Spinal Three Column Osteotomy

Introduction The use of intrathecal morphine has the potential to help alleviate the pain that patients experience undergoing spinal surgeries. Complications can cause immobilization, which can lead to vascular thrombosis and ileus. Studies have shown epidural analgesia significantly lowered postoperative pain scores in scoliosis surgeries. Intrathecal anesthesia has been shown to have good pain control over the initial 24-hour postoperative period. Purpose Determine if intrathecal morphine would reduce postoperative pain with minimal side effects. Methods The surgical case logs from three spinal deformity surgeons from a single academic medical center were reviewed retrospectively. This included cases where more than five levels of fusion occurred and surgery involved an osteotomy. The records of 17 patients were queried, and patient and surgical data were collected. The patients were divided into two groups: eight patients were administered intrathecal morphine and nine patients received no morphine. Postoperative pain scores were obtained hourly over the initial 24 hours postoperatively by nurses trained to obtain pain scores from the Numeric Pain Rating Scale. In addition, the rates of any noted side effects were recorded. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Fisher’s exact tests were used to calculate any statistical significance with p < 0.05 considered to be significant. Results The maximum and total 24-hour postoperative pain scores had a mean of 5.6 (standard deviation = 4.2; p = 0.4266) and 69.3 (standard deviation = 57.8; p = 0.9189), respectively, for patients administered intrathecal morphine. The patients who did not receive intrathecal morphine had total pain scores of 3.9 (standard deviation = 4.5) and 65.7 (standard deviation = 79.7), respectively. Though the results were not statistically significant, there was a potential trend toward decreased in pain mean scores in the first 10 hours for the intrathecal morphine group. There was no statistical difference in the rate of side effects between patients. Conclusions The use of intrathecal morphine did not significantly appear to reduce postoperative pain in patients when compared to intravenous or oral narcotics. There was a potential trend in a reduction in postoperative pain during the first 10 hours postoperatively, but this did not reach a statistically significant value and did not hold up after the first 10 hours postoperatively. However, it was noted that intrathecal morphine was safe to use in postoperative spinal deformity surgery as no statistical significance in side effects was noted.