Quiz: Initial Clinical Pain Management in Cats & Dogs

Effective pain management in veterinary patients is important because pain can negatively impact quality of life and increase morbidity and mortality.¹ Analgesics can minimize or eliminate nociceptive impulses at several locations in the nociceptive pathway, including peripheral and central components that involve opioid receptors, alpha-2–adrenergic receptors, sodium channels, and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors. Multimodal pain management protocols are effective because they target multiple sites in the nociceptive pathway.²

Acute pain is a physiologic sequela to tissue injury that can be treated with multimodal management.³ Chronic pain is the result of severe and/or poorly managed acute pain that causes permanent changes in nociceptive pathways and can be prevented with use of multimodal analgesia during the acute phase of nociception.⁴ Clinical presentations of chronic pain include ongoing inflammation, osteoarthritis, neuropathic pain, and cancer pain.⁴