Articles: opioid.
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Opioid-induced constipation (OIC) is common in people treated with opioids and poses risks for physical sequelae, analgesic discontinuation, and decreased quality of life. ⋯ Physicians need a better understanding of the negative impacts of OIC for patients and better OIC-specific methods to assess, treat, and monitor it.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2015
Comparative StudyOpioid Concentrations in Oral Fluid and Plasma in Cancer Patients With Pain.
Measuring opioid concentrations in pain treatment is warranted in situations where optimal opioid analgesia is difficult to reach. ⋯ OFL analysis is well suited for detecting the studied opioids. For morphine and fentanyl, an approximation of the plasma opioid concentrations is obtainable, whereas for oxycodone, the OFL/plasma concentration relationship is too variable for reliable approximation results.
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Opioids may alter immune function, thereby potentially affecting cancer recurrence. The authors investigated the association between postdiagnosis opioid use and breast cancer recurrence. ⋯ This large, prospective cohort study provided no clinically relevant evidence of an association between opioid prescriptions and breast cancer recurrence. The current findings are important to cancer survivorship, because opioids are frequently used to manage pain associated with comorbid conditions.
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To determine if patients receiving chronic opioid therapy can be tapered to lower opioid doses without a subsequent increase in pain. ⋯ Patients in the population studied can be successfully tapered to lower opioid doses and may not necessarily experience more pain.
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In spite of several approved analgesics, the therapy of pain still constitutes a challenge due to the fact that the drugs do not exert sufficient efficacy or are associated with severe side effects. Therefore, the development of new and improved painkillers is still of great importance. A number of highly qualified scientists in Germany are investigating signal transduction pathways in pain, effectivity of new drugs and the so far incompletely investigated mechanisms of well-known analgesics in preclinical and clinical studies. The highlights of pharmacological pain research in Germany are summarized in this article.