To blunt postoperative pain and reduce the need for opioid drugs following surgery, anesthesiologists often give patients low doses of the drug ketamine during operations. Recent research even suggests that the drug might alleviate postsurgical delirium and confusion in older adults.

But a new study led by anesthesiologists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University of Michigan Medical School and Weill Cornell Medicine suggests that ketamine doesn’t lower levels of pain or reduce the need for pain-killing opioid drugs in the days after an operation.

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