Sufficient analgesia is essential for canine patients undergoing oral surgery, such as dental extractions and orthopaedic procedures involving the maxilla and/or mandible. These procedures produce strong sensory stimulation that impact on general anaesthetic requirements and produce post-operative pain (Woodward 2008). Providing multimodal analgesia for our patients is beneficial for several reasons. From a clinical standpoint, pre-operative local nerve blocks decrease the level of intraoperative and postoperative pain and result in smoother recoveries (Woodward 2008). Multimodal analgesia may encompass administration of opioids, tranquillizers, and local anaesthetic agents as adjuncts to general anaesthetic agents. Common side …show more content…
The infraorbital nerve itself branches into cranial, middle and caudal superior alveolar branches. The caudal superior alveolar branch provides sensory innervation to the fourth premolar and both molars. The middle superior alveolar branch provides sensory innervation to the first, second and third premolars. The cranial superior branches supply sensory innervation to the canine tooth and the incisors (Woodward 2008). The nerve is routinely blocked via either an extra-oral or intra-oral approach to the bony infraorbital canal, the foramen of which is located dorsal to the distal root of the third maxillary premolar in canines (Beckman …show more content…
These guidelines provide a fixed dose that does not specifically account for head confirmation or body size. Nor do they take into consideration injection of a local anaesthetic agent directly into the infraorbital canal, where the direction of diffusion into tissues is limited by the bony margins of the canal itself. Several studies have compared the methods of performing blockade to the infraorbital nerve in canines (Cremer et al. 2013; Viscasillas et al. 2013), using anaesthetic doses listed above. To the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of any works that experimentally validate the current dosing guidelines for infraorbital nerve blockage in canine