By conducting a monocentric, randomized, controlled, assessor- and patient-blinded clinical trial of 136 patients who underwent major surgery, Léger et al. compared the effects of opioid-free anesthesia and standard anesthesia protocols on the quality of recovery assessed by the Quality of Recovery-15 (QoR-15) score in the first 72 h after surgery. They showed that the opioid-free anesthesia protocol improved the quality of early postoperative recovery in a statistically but not clinically significant manner. As primary outcome of this study, however, the authors did not provide the preoperative QoR-15 scores and state whether they were comparable between groups in baseline characteristics of patients. Available evidence indicates that preoperative baseline QoR-15 scores are positively associated with early postoperative QoR-15 scores. Because the difference between preoperative and postoperative QoR-15 scores may display the features of patient’s perioperative experience changes, moreover, it has been used to compare the influence of anesthetic...

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