Non anesthetic action of local anesthetics

Local anesthetics are not only used as drugs to block the sodium channel to provide analgesia and anti-arrhythmic action. The purpose of this review is to highlight the new indications and limitations of this class of drugs. Recent research has focused on the use of i.v. local anesthetics to improve bowel function after surgery or trauma, to protect the central nervous system, to find new clues of local anesthetic effects in chronic neuropathic pain and to investigate the long-term effect of anesthesia / analgesia provided by local anesthetics on cancer recurrence. Recent facts dealing with myoand chondrotoxicity are presented. There is growing evidence that local anesthetics have a broad spectrum of indications aside analgesia and anti-arrhythmic effect.Most of them are still insufficiently known and investigated. These new indications will no doubt be intensively studied in the coming years.