Early perioperative versus postoperative meloxicam for pain control in patients undergoing orthopedic surgery: a systematic review and Meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Abstract

Objective

Post-orthopaedic operative pain is a serious concern that often requires the administration of analgesics; however, the optimal time of analgesic administration is still inconclusive. Perioperative analgesia is administrating pre-emptive analgesia before and during the surgery followed by postoperative analgesia to decrease the procedure associated nociceptive response. We aim to assess perioperative meloxicam versus postoperative meloxicam for pain control after orthopaedic operations.

Methods

A systematic review and meta-analysis involving randomized controlled trials from PubMed, Embase, Scopus, WOS, and Cochrane until 28th May 2022. We pooled dichotomous outcomes using risk ratio (RR) presented with a 95% confidence interval (CI) and continuous outcomes using mean difference (MD) with 95% CI. We registered our protocol in PROSPERO with ID: CRD42022336046.

Results

We included five RCTs with 964 patients. All the included trials showed high risk of performance and detection biases because of lack of blinding. Pooled analysis favored perioperative meloxicam in reducing pain score after six hours (MD: −0.42 with 95% CI [−0.63, −0.21], p = .0001), 12 h (MD: −0.54 with 95% CI [−0.69, −0.39], p = .00001), and 24 h (MD: −0.23 with 95% CI [−0.36, −0.10]. Pooled analysis favored perioperative meloxicam in improving patient global assessment scale after 12 h (MD: −0.66 with 95% CI [−0.86, −0.46], p = .00001), 24 h (MD: −0.30 with 95% CI [−0.49, −0.11, p = .002), and 48 h (MD: −0.17 with 95% CI [−0.33, −0.01], p = .04). Pooled analysis favored perioperative meloxicam in reducing patient-controlled analgesia (MD: −4.25 with 95% CI [−5.96, −2.54], p = .00001).

Conclusion

Short-term pain management after orthopaedic procedures is better accomplished with perioperative meloxicam than postoperative meloxicam. Before recommending perioperative meloxicam for pain control following orthopaedic surgeries, further multicentre trials are still warranted to examine the impact of perioperative meloxicam in different orthopaedic procedures.

Keywords:

• Meloxicam
• perioperative
• pain
• orthopaedics
• NSAIDs
• systematic review
• meta-analysis

Transparency

Declaration of funding

This paper was not funded.

Declaration of financial/other relationships

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

AM conceived the idea. BA and MA designed the research workflow. AA and MA searched the databases. FL, RF, and BK screened the retrieved records, and MA resolved the conflicts. AK, FL, RF, and BK extracted relevant data, assessed the quality of evidence, and MA resolved the conflicts. MA and BA performed the analysis. MA and AG wrote the final manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the final version of the manuscript.

Acknowledgements

None.

Data availability statement 

The data are available on request.