Intranasal ketamine as an analgesic agent for acute pain management in emergency department: A literature review

• Main Authors: Abdolghader Pakniyat, Morteza Qaribi, Dorin Rahnama Hezaveh, Ali Abdolrazaghnejad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications 2018-01-01
• Series: Journal of Acute Disease
• Subjects: Administration; Intranasal; Emergency department; Ketamine; Pain management; Review literature
• Online Access: http://www.jadweb.org/article.asp?issn=2221-6189;year=2018;volume=7;issue=6;spage=241;epage=246;aulast=Pakniyat
• ISSN: 2221-6189; 2589-5516

Ketamine is a well-known dissociative anesthetic agent, and has been used over 50 years. Intranasal pathway is a mucosal way for absorbing agents to directly affect in brain via olfactory sheets, bypassing first pass metabolism and the blood brain barrier. The current uses of intranasal ketamine as an analgesic agent for acute pain management in emergency department are discussed in this review article. Using "ketamine", "pain or analgesia", and "intranasal" as keywords, a search of google scholar, Pubmed, web of science, and Medline database from 1970 until 2017 was performed. Finally, from 1 204 papers extracted via primary search, 1 088 papers were omitted and finally 10 studies were considered for further assessment. There were four observational studies, one case series and report and 5 clinical trials. Ketamine was used for acute pain control due to musculoskeletal trauma, burns, and painful procedures. A total of 390 cases were included in these studies. The studies used ketamine with doses ranging 0.45-1.25 mg/kg via intranasal pathway. Intranasal ketamine provides relatively rapid, well tolerated, and clinically significant analgesia for emergency department patients. Considering the lack of adequate studies and undetermined intranasal dose, it is better to conduct further high quality investigation in both adults and pediatrics.