Key words: burn pain, morphine, gabapentin. Summary

ys drug combinations that have different action mechanisms in order to improve pain relief, there-by minimizing dose dependent adverse effects, is recommended for burn pain management. Effective adjuncts for analgesia for burn patients still need to be developed. Aim: To evaluate the efficacy of gabapentin as an adjunct to morphine patient-controlled analgesia (IV-PCA) in pain treatment for burn patients during the 72-h period after injury. Methods. A prospective randomized controlled stu-dy. The pain treatment protocol was standardized with IV-PCA for all of the patients. The treatment patient group received 1200 mg per day of oral ga-bapentin. Morphine consumption, pain scores, inci-dence of adverse effects were recorded every 3 h (during the first 24 h after burn) and every 6 h the-reafter or during the adverse event cases. Pain was assessed at rest and on movement: flexion in burn of extremity and cough in burn of torso. Results. During the study period, 53 severe burn patients (TBSA≥10%) were included (n=29 in the control group and n=24 in the treatment group). Morphine consumption on the three first days af-ter a burn was significantly lower in the treatment group than in the control group (p<0.001). The to-tal morphine consumption in the treatment group was 28 % less than in the control group. The VAS scores were lower in the treatment group as well (p<0.001). No clinically significant adverse effects were documented. Conclusions. Our results indicate that 1200 mg of gabapentin may be useful as a safe analgesic adjunc