The surgical operations are associated with moderate to severe incidence of complications such as postoperative pain. Although there are several analgesic drugs, currently ketamine is used for postoperative pain control. Ketamine is a well-known general anesthetic and short-acting intraoperative analgesic. High-dose ketamine acts as an intravenous anesthetic, whereas low-dose ketamine acts as an analgesic. The study examined the clinical effects of low dose ketamine plus local anesthetic on postoperative pain after several dental surgeries.

Methods: In this study, it was investigated that the clinical efficacy of ketamine administrated with local anesthetic for pain relief after surgery. The study included 45 patients, who were undergoing several dental surgery. Local anesthetic was applied to the patients in which 0.2 mg/kg ketamine was added. All the patients were advised to administer the analgesic drug, only if needed and recorded the administration time and the number of tablets taken. After the surgery, the pain scores were recorded at 1, 3, 5 and 7 days.

Results: The combination of a local anesthetic and ketamine during surgery produced good local anesthesia, and good postoperative analgesia. None of the patients did not use any analgesic drugs.

Conclusions: The addition of 0.2 mg/kg dose of ketamine to local anesthetic agents were found very effective for increasing the duration of regional anesthesia and postoperative analgesia. Side effects such as nausea, vomiting, hallucinations, nystagmus, excitation, and photophobia have not been reported in this study, depending on the dose of ketamine.

Conflict of interest: None declared.