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

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.