Being able to understand and better control pain in patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty will help in many different areas of medicine. Gabapentin is one pain control modality that has been used by many different orthopaedic surgeons with excellent retrospective results. Gabapentin, however, has never been studied, to the investigators knowledge, in a prospective randomized fashion in the United States for total knee arthroplasty. This study will be the first of its kind to truly compare the effects of gabapentin, a drug that has been proven safe in many other areas of medicine, with placebo for total knee arthroplasty by analyzing post-operative narcotic usage, function and sleep quality.
The purpose of this project is to study the effects of gabapentin on pain control in the perioperative and post-operative period of total knee arthroplasty.