Opioid Usage During Admission in Hip Fracture Patients—The Effect of the Continuous Femoral Nerve Block

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to investigate whether there was a difference in opioid usage during admission for hip fracture patients with continuous femoral nerve block (cFNB) when compared to patients nonfemoral nerve block (nFNB). METHODS AND MATERIALS Patients were identified from the local database on all hip fracture patients admitted to Bispebjerg University Hospital, Denmark. Four hundred fifty-six hip fracture patients were included during the period September 2008 to October 2010. RESULTS Three hundred sixty-six hip fracture patients had cFNB. The mean time with cFNB was 3.4 days. There were no significant differences in gender, length of stay, time to surgery, mortality rate, in-hospital falls, or resurgery rates during admission between the 2 groups. The nFNB group had an insignificant higher use of morphine as needed during the first 5 days of admission (nFNB: 53.1 mg, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 34.4-71.7; cFNB: 47.7 mg, 95% CI: 40.7-64.3; P = .54) and during the whole admission (cFNB: 34.3 mg, 95% CI: 23.2-45.5; cFNB: 30.3 mg, 95% CI: 26.6-33.0; P = .4). Some 8.47% of the total morphine consumption during admission was morphine as needed for the nFNB group and 9.89% for the cFNB group. CONCLUSION Patients with cFNB did only have a marginally lower opioid usage during admission when compared to patients without the block, with no significance between the 2 groups. This could indicate that the cFNB is an ineffective analgesic strategy, especially in the postoperative period, but larger randomized studies are needed in order to clarify this.