Conditions: Pain Breast Cancer Lung Cancer
Allocation: RANDOMIZED | Intervention model: PARALLEL
Enrollment: 422
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
The goal of this study is to determine whether administering Gabapentin prior to surgery affects duration of pain and opioid use post-surgery. The investigators aim to compare gabapentin to placebo in a prospective, randomized clinical trial in which patients will be followed post-surgery until pain resolves and opioid use ceases.

Detailed description:
Gabapentin was originally developed as an anti-convulsant, but was quickly recognized as a medication with significant analgesic activity in patients with neuropathic pain. More recently it has begun to be appreciated that it may have some benefits in the peri-operative period. Pre-operative Gabapentin reduces preoperative anxiety, early post-operative pain severity, post-operative opioid use and post-operative delirium (presumably through reduced opioid consumption). These same attributes are shared by medications such as NSAIDS and tylenol and the use of peri-operative gabapentin has not permeated the standard of care. Early post-operative pain severity and preoperative anxiety have been implicated in our own research as risk factors for prolonged time to pain resolution and prolonged time to opioid cessation. Since these endpoints are generally synonymous with time to recovery, interventions reducing these times would be seen not just to increase comfort but to actually speed recovery.

Arms:
arm 1: Active placebo given pre-operatively, followed by inactive placebo for 10 doses post-operatively arm 2: 1200 mg Gabapentin preoperative dose, 300 mg of Gabapentin 3-times a day postoperative doses for 72-hour post-surgical period.

Interventions: intervention 1: Gabapentin intervention 2: Lorazepam (active control) intervention 3: Placebo (inactive)
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: 1200 mg Gabapentin preoperative dose, 300 mg of Gabapentin 3-times a day postoperative doses for 72-hour post-surgical period. intervention 2: 0.5 mg Lorazepam (active control) given pre-operatively in a single dose. intervention 3: 2 capsules of inactive placebo given 3-times a day post-operatively for the 72-hour post-surgical period.

Protocol document: