Pain Intensity on the First Day after Surgery

Severe pain after surgery remains a major problem, occurring in 20-40% of patients. Despite numerous published studies, the degree of pain following many types of surgery in everyday clinical practice is unknown. To improve postoperative pain therapy and develop procedure-specific, optimized pain-treatment protocols, types of surgery that may result in severe postoperative pain in everyday practice must first be identified.

This study considered 115,775 patients from 578 surgical wards in 105 German hospitals. A total of 70,764 patients met the inclusion criteria. On the first postoperative day, patients were asked to rate their worst pain intensity since surgery (numeric rating scale, 0-10). All surgical procedures were assigned to 529 well-defined groups. When a group contained fewer than 20 patients, the data were excluded from analysis. Finally, 50,523 patients from 179 surgical groups were compared.