Previous clinical studies have not examined the relationship between nicotine abstinence and opioid use for postoperative analgesia. This may be important because tobacco smokers are routinely required to abstain from smoking just before and during acute post-surgical recovery. This study investigated IV morphine self-administration [patient controlled analgesia (PCA)], subjective pain/drug effects and other measures during post-operative (elective Cesarean section) recovery.
These preliminary data suggest that a history of nicotine use and/or short-term nicotine abstinence can modulate morphine use and analgesia during post-operative recovery. These procedures provide a model for studying patterns and determinants of analgesic self-administration in medical settings.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/alan_marco/62/
This paper has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) allowing users to download articles and share them with others as long as they credit the authors and the publisher, but without permission to change them in any way or use them commercially.