Objective: Acute pain is one of the most common pains experienced by post-cleft lip or cleft surgery patients regardless of the administration of analgesic agents. This current study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of a curcumin patch as an adjuvant analgesic agent on the post-cleft lip and cleft palate surgery patients.
Materials and methods: Fifty-five (33 male; 22 female) participants aged 36 months or less are recruited in this pragmatic trial and randomly assigned to a control group, where no curcumin patch was applied; or the experimental group, where the participants wore a curcumin patch with a dosage of 100 mg. All participants (regardless of the group) received a standardized postsurgery analgesic agent immediately after the surgery was completed. A face, leg, activity, cry, and consolability (FLACC) scale was used to evaluate pain levels for three subsequent time points.
Statistical analysis: All data were then analyzed by using the Mann-Whitney U test to compare the mean differences between the two groups.
Results: The results of the current study revealed that there was no significant difference found between the control and the experimental group when mean pain scores were compared for the first evaluation time. Yet, there was a significant difference (p < 0.01) between the two groups' mean pain scores on the second evaluation time.
Conclusion: Curcumin patch was found to be effective when used as an adjuvant analgesic agent to reduce acute-orofacial postsurgery pain in cleft lip and cleft surgery patients.
The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, permitting unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction so long as the original work is properly cited. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).