Nociception Level Index–Guided Intraoperative Analgesia for Improved Postoperative Recovery: A Randomized Trial

BACKGROUND: Nociception is the physiological response to nociceptive stimuli, normally experienced as pain. During general anesthesia, patients experience and respond to nociceptive stimuli by increasing blood pressure and heart rate if not controlled by preemptive analgesia. The PMD-200 system from Medasense (Ramat Gan, Israel) evaluates the balance between nociceptive stimuli and analgesia during general anesthesia and generates the nociception level (NOL) index from a single finger probe. NOL is a unitless index ranging from 0 to 100, with values exceeding 25 indicating that nociception exceeds analgesia. We aimed to demonstrate that titrating intraoperative opioid administration to keep NOL <25 optimizes intraoperative opioid dosing. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that pain scores during the initial 60 minutes of recovery are lower in patients managed with NOL-guided fentanyl than in patients given fentanyl per clinical routine. METHODS: We conducted a randomized, single-center trial of patients having major abdominal open and laparoscopic surgeries. Patients were randomly assigned 1:1 to intraoperative NOL-guided fentanyl administration or fentanyl given per clinical routine. The primary outcome was pain score (0–10 verbal response scale) at 10-minute intervals during the initial 60 minutes of recovery. Our secondary outcome was a measure of adequate analgesia, defined as a pain score <5, assessed separately at each interval. RESULTS: With a planned maximum sample size of 144, the study was stopped for futility after enrolling 72 patients from November 2020 to October 2021. Thirty-five patients were assigned to NOL-guided analgesic dosing and 37 to routine care. Patients in the NOL group spent significantly less time with a NOL index >25 (median reduction [95% confidence interval {CI}] of 14 [4–25] minutes) were given nearly twice as much intraoperative fentanyl (median [quartiles] 500 [330, 780] vs 300 [200, 330] µg), and required about half as much morphine in the recovery period (3.3 [0, 8] vs 7.7 [0, 13] mg). However, in the primary outcome analysis, NOL did not reduce pain scores in the first 60 minutes after awakening, assessed in a linear mixed effects model with mean (standard error [SE]) of 4.12 (0.59) for NOL and 4.04 (0.58) for routine care, and estimated difference in means of 0.08 (−1.43, 1.58), P = .895. CONCLUSIONS: More intraoperative fentanyl was given in NOL-guided patients, but NOL guidance did not reduce initial postoperative pain scores.