Pentazocine Alone Versus Pentazocine Plus Diclofenac for Pain Relief in the First 24 Hours after Caesarean Section: A Randomized Controlled Study

Postoperative pain is one of the main postoperative adverse outcomes following caesarean section. Its management still remains a challenge especially in a low resource setting. To compare the efficacy of intramuscular pentazocine alone and combined intramuscular pentazocine with diclofenac for pain relief within 24 hours after caesarean section. This was a double blind randomized control study of post caesarean section pain management of 140 participants between April and December, 2015 at the Federal Teaching hospital, Abakaliki. Inclusion criteria involved consenting and low risk parturients who had caesarean section under spinal anaesthesia. The participants were randomly grouped into Pentazocine-Placebo (PP) group and Pentazocine-Diclofenac (PD) group. The PP group received pentazocine 30 mg every 4 hours for 24 hours and 3 milliliters of water for injection as placebo 12 hourly for 24 hours while the PD group received pentazocine 30 mg every 4 hours and diclofenac 75 mg every 12 hours for 24 hours. The level of pain control was assessed using the Visual Analog Scale (VAS). The data was analysed with IBM SPSS version 20.0. The level of significance was set at < 0.05. The use of PD for 24 hour post caesarean section analgesia achieved better pain relief, faster onset of postoperative ambulation, bowel sound auscultation and oral feeding than the use of PP (p-value ≤0.002). However, the use of PD is more expensive than PP (p-value =0.0001). There was no difference between the two groups of participants on the passage of flatus and duration of hospital stay (p-value≥0.05). The use of PP was associated with more maternal side effects (p-value=0.009). There was no difference on the level of satisfaction between the two groups of participants (p-value≥0.05). The use of PD for post caesarean section analgesia is more effective in achieving a satisfactory pain relief and has less side effects.