Dr. Przkora is coauthor of new guidelines on pain management in adult burn patients

Rene Przkora, MD, PhD

Rene Przkora, MD, PhD, is a coauthor on new guidelines published by the American Burn Association for managing acute pain in adult burn patients. The guidelines, published online on Sept. 4 in the Journal of Burn Care and Research, are the first time the guidelines have been revised in the 14 years since they were developed, despite significant change in burn care practice.

Dr. Przkora, Professor of Anesthesiology, Chief of the Pain Medicine Division, and Director of the Multidisciplinary Pain Medicine Fellowship, is one of 17 authors on the paper, which represented a subcommittee of the American Burn Association’s Committee on the Organization and Delivery of Burn Care. The paper is titled “American Burn Association Guidelines on the Management of Acute Pain in the Adult Burn Patient: A Review of the Literature, a Compilation of Expert Opinion, and Next Steps.”

The group conducted an extensive literature search, ultimately analyzing 246 papers. A consensus meeting was held, and 20 guidelines were created in the following areas: pain assessment, opioid medications, nonopioid medications, regional anesthesia, and nonpharmacologic treatments.

The guidelines concluded by stating that available studies are inadequate to support a true standard of care.

“Moving forward we call for more burn specific research into all modalities for burn pain control as well as research on multimodal pain control,” the authors wrote. “Additionally, we call for the use of common data elements in burn pain research studies so studies and protocols created can be reliably compared.”