[News article] Study reveals lack of data on opioid drugs for chronic pain — ScienceDaily

Study reveals lack of data on opioid drugs for chronic pain — ScienceDaily.
http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0303-prescription-opioids.html

 

From the article

Date:January 15, 2015

Source:University of Connecticut

Summary:Researchers have found little to no evidence for the effectiveness of opioid drugs in the treatment of long-term chronic pain, despite the explosive recent growth in the use of the drugs.

Read the article here

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Pain in Infancy Alters Response to Stress, Anxiety Later in Life

The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

From the 30 October 2013 ScienceDaily article

 

Early life pain alters neural circuits in the brain that regulate stress, suggesting pain experienced by infants who often do not receive analgesics while undergoing tests and treatment in neonatal intensive care may permanently alter future responses to anxiety, stress and pain in adulthood, a research team led by Dr. Anne Murphy, associate director of the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University, has discovered.

n estimated 12 percent of live births in the U.S. are considered premature, researchers said. These infants often spend an average of 25 days in neonatal intensive care, where they endure 10-to-18 painful and inflammatory procedures each day, including insertion of feeding tubes and intravenous lines, intubation and repeated heel lance. Despite evidence that pain and stress circuitry in the brain are established and functional in preterm infants, about 65 percent of these procedures are performed without benefit of analgesia. Some clinical studies suggest early life pain has an immediate and long-term impact on responses to stress- and anxiety-provoking events.

The Georgia State study examined whether a single painful inflammatory procedure performed on male and female rat pups on the day of birth alters specific brain receptors that affect behavioral sensitivity to stress, anxiety and pain in adulthood. The findings demonstrated that such an experience is associated with site-specific changes in the brain that regulate how the pups responded to stressful situations. Alterations in how these receptors function have also been associated with mood disorders.

The study findings mirror what is now being reported clinically. Children who experienced unresolved pain following birth show reduced responsiveness to pain and stress.

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Read the entire article here

 

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Docs Feel Pressure to Give Addicts Opioids

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By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage Today,Published: October 24, 2012

A push to treat chronic pain and financial disincentives for treating addiction may pressure clinicians into prescribing opioids for patients who are already addicted, a researcher suggested.

Over the past decade, there’s been a perfect storm of changing clinician attitudes toward pain treatment and patient attitudes towards suffering, combined with a lack of compensation for time-consuming clinic visits such as addiction counseling, Anna Lembke, MD, of Stanford University, wrote in a perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine.

That may be leading doctors to write scripts for pain pills even if they know those patients are abusing their medications, Lembke wrote.

“Treatment of pain is held up as the holy grail of compassionate medical care,” she wrote, and clinicians have, over the last decade, felt more compelled to deliver treatment.

They also have the additional pressure of consumer ratings sites, because patients who are dissatisfied may turn around and leave a less-than-favorable review online. Lembke cites the example of one colleague who will occasionally bite the bullet: “Sometimes I just have to do the right thing and refuse to prescribe them, even if I know they’re going to go on Yelp and give me a bad rating,” the colleague told her…

Related Resources

• Cochrane reviews for pain management (anesthesia and pain control)
  More info about Cochrane reviews (systematic summaries of medical studies) at http://www.cochrane.org/cochrane-reviews
• MedlinePlus-Pain has links to resources on treatments, alternative therapy, research news, and more

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