Thoracic surgery has been progressed rapidly from traditional thoracotomy to triportal thoracoscopy, and even uniportal thoracoscopy within past decades. Perioperative pain control is always an important issue for postoperative recovery and prevention of chronic pain. The acute pain is most severe in the first 2 to 4 hours after the surgery until the chest tube removal. This painful sensation might postpone the ambulation time and restrain patient's respiratory depth or ability to cough. Although the surgical wound is getting smaller, the incidence of chronic pain is not declined as presumed. The incidence of chronic pain is highly related to acute pain control. In the guideline of enhanced recovery after lung surgery, multimodal analgesia is recommended. The combination of regional analgesia like thoracic epidural blockade (TEB) or paravertebral nerve blockade (PVB), and medications with different mechanism are beneficial for recovery. Intercostal nerve blockade is also studied and popular in recent years.
However, currently there is no optimal perioperative pain control suggestion for uniportal video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS). In uniportal VATS, the chest tube is the massive contribution for acute pain, and which is usually removed within postoperative 24 hours. In this study, the investigators would like to use the selective COX-2 inhibitor, parecoxib, combined with intra-operative intercostal nerve blockade for perioperative pain control. Parecoxib is relative long-acting than other currently using parental NSAID medication. The primary outcome is the morphine consumption in parecoxib and placebo groups. The secondary outcome is the numeric rating scale (NRS) during rest and cough, side effects, salvage medications, and chronic pain incidence in 3 months. The investigators hypothesized that parecoxib could effectively improve postoperative acute pain and reduce morphine consumption without serious side effects.
