Predictive factors of success and failure for intravenous ketamine therapy in patients suffering from chronic neuropathic pain

Background: Intravenous (IV) ketamine is used for chronic neuropathic pain refractory to other treatments. Administration of such a medication requires high-cost services while the result is not always satisfactory with a significant percentage of failure. Success and failure are related to some factors.

Method: In this study, we aim to point the most responsive disease category to IV ketamine and the predictive factors for successful and failed treatment. Two hundred and sixty-nine patients out of 371 were included. Demographic, clinical, and therapy-related variables were retrospectively collected and then statistically analyzed using various descriptive and inferential methods. A few descriptive statistics are obtained for the variables depending on their nature (e.g., percentages for qualitative variables and means for quantitative variables). Furthermore, several inferential methods are considered to address some statistical points of interest, including, but not limited to, odds ratio interpretations via logistic regression as well as association and correlation analyses.

Results: A significant association was found between the presence of intermittent pain pattern as well as the pain of chronic primary category and favorable response to IV ketamine while the history of previous analgesic interventions was significantly associated with a negative response.

Conclusion: The identified factors can be used to prospectively study the efficacy of ketamine using selection criteria based on the observed results in our study to re-evaluate the percentage of responsiveness according to these new parameters.