Intraoperative magnesium helps control postoperative pain and vomiting in spine surgery: Lancet

China: A team of researchers led by Lei Yue discovered that intraoperative intravenous magnesium (IIM) as adjuvant analgesics exhibited overall advantages in terms of lowering analgesic demand and postoperative nausea and vomiting in spine surgery. The findings of this were published in the journal of E Clinical Medicine by Lancet on 04th January 2022.

Recent randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have shown contradictory results about the usefulness and safety of IIM in spine surgery. As a result, the researchers undertook this study with the goal of determining the influence of IIM on spine surgery.

On July 12th, 2021, a literature search was conducted using numerous electronic databases, including ClinicalTrial.gov and Google Scholar, and reference lists were inspected. The researchers chose RCTs that compared the impact of IIM vs placebo therapy on spine surgery. They used a random-effect model to generate pooled standard mean difference (SMD) or risk ratio (RR) with a 95 percent confidence interval (CI). The Cochrane risk-of-bias tool was used to assess the risk of bias, and the Jadad score was used to assess the quality of each included study. The Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) method was used to calculate the level of certainty in effect estimations. Sensitivity analysis was performed by removing each included study from the pooled analysis one at a time.