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Preoperative Tramadol Fails to Improve Function After Knee Surgery
Key clinical point: Knee surgery patients given tramadol had the least improvement in Knee Disability and Osteoarthritis Outcome Scores after 3 months, compared with those given narcotics or no opiates.
Major finding: After knee surgery, patients given tramadol improved an average of 12.5 points on an outcome score versus improvements of 19.1 and 20.1, respectively, in patients given narcotics or treatment-naive patients.
Study details: The data come from a retrospective study of adults who underwent total knee arthroplasty between January 2017 and March 2018.
Disclosures: The researchers had no financial conflicts to disclose.
Driesman A et al. J Arthroplasty. 2019;34(8):1662-66.