The Clinical journal of pain
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This paper describes characteristics of opioid use episodes for noncancer pain and defines thresholds for de facto long-term opioid therapy. ⋯ Long-term opioid therapy was characterized by the diversity in medications prescribed, dosage levels, and frequency of use. The proposed threshold for long-term opioid therapy provides a checkpoint for physicians to review whether an explicit decision to sustain opioid therapy has been reached, and to ensure that a documented treatment plan and provisions for monitoring medication use and patient outcomes are in place.
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Prescription opioid misuse is a growing problem in the United States. There are limited data to illuminate the nature of this issue. The Internet seems to be a novel approach in surveying populations of opioid users. An Internet-based survey of nonmedical opioid users visiting informational drug websites was used to measure rates of nonmedical use and characterize users. ⋯ This project demonstrates the feasibility of conducting product-specific, online surveys with rapid recruitment of participants from websites. This approach differentiates rates of nonmedical use of specific prescription opioids and provides other insights into individuals who nonmedically use opioids.
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To provide a better empirical understanding of the dimensionality of neuropathic and non-neuropathic pain quality. ⋯ The findings support the hypothesis that pain qualities cluster into distinct groups. If replicated in additional samples, the pain quality domains identified may provide clinicians and researchers with a useful way to summarize data from pain quality measures, and may also provide meaningful end points that would allow for treatment differentiation between various pharmacologic entities.