Efficacy of Preemptive Analgesia with Pregabalin in Orthognathic Surgery-A Systematic Review

Background: Orthognathic surgery is a treatment approach that is used for correcting the congenital or developmental anomalies of maxilla and mandible as well as secondary deformities of trauma. During these procedure saws, chisels, separators, and plate screw systems are used. Postoperative pain is an acute pain that is accompanied by the inflammatory process that occurs as a result of surgical trauma, and gradually decreases with tissue recovery. The analgesic prevents the establishment of the central sensitization due to incisional injury (only covers the surgical period) and prevents the establishment of the central sensitization (covering the surgical and early postoperative periods). Pregabalin is a structural gama-aminobutyric acid (GABA) analogue. It has been shown in recent studies that pregabalin, which is involved in chronical pain treatment, can also be involved in acute postoperative pain treatment.

Objectives: The aim of this systematic review is to assess the efficacy of preemptive analgesia with pregabalin on postoperative pain in orthognathic surgery.

Materials and Methods: The Data Bases of PubMed, Cochrane and Google scholar were searched for the related topics along with a complimentary manual search of all oral surgery journals till September 2019. Articles were selected based on the inclusion criteria, which included all RCTs.

Results: From this systematic review it is concluded that pre-emptive analgesia with pregabalin is effective in lowering acute postoperative pain in the patients who have undergone orthognathic surgery.

Conclusion: In this systematic review we have concluded that, on average, a single dose of pregabalin was shown to decrease post-operative pain. More studies have to be done to evaluate the efficacy of the drug.