Ketamine for Pain in Sickle Cell Disease Reduces Opioid Usage

Pain attributable to sickle cell disease (SCD) is often unpredictable, recurrent, and requires complex treatments. Subanesthetic ketamine infusion has been studied in other diseases and disorders, but there is still limited data on its efficacy in pain management for SCD.

The primary objective is to determine if subanesthetic ketamine infusion reduces pain scores and opioid requirements in hospitalized pediatric patients with SCD.

Forty-six admissions among 22 patients between February 2018 and December 2019 were analyzed. We observed decrease in pain scores within 24 hours of ketamine initiation in 34 of 46 admissions (mean pain score per patient before ketamine initiation: 2.2-9.7, mean pain score per patient after ketamine initiation: 0-9.7; P < .05). We observed a decrease in pain scores in the remaining 12 admissions after greater than 24 hours of ketamine initiation. Opioid usage declined after ketamine infusion, with a difference of means in oral morphine equivalents before and after ketamine of 122.8 mg/day. The side effects observed with ketamine infusion included hallucinations in 11 (23.9%) admissions. Only four (8.7%) admissions required cessation of the infusion due to side effects. The readmission rate at two weeks and four weeks after first ketamine infusion was the same (12.5%) at both time points. For all patients in the cohort, the introduction of ketamine into pain regimens did not reduce the number of admissions in the year following ketamine initiation relative to the year prior.

In pediatric patients with SCD, subanesthetic ketamine was safe as a continuous infusion and effectively reduced both pain scores and opioid requirements.