Feasibility study of rapid opioid rotation and titration.

Background: Opioid guidelines recommend opioid rotation and switching for patients who do not achieve adequate pain relief or who experience intolerable adverse events (AEs) with their current opioid. However, specific recommendations and protocols for opioid rotation are lacking, making the practice time consuming and difficult for primary care physicians to accomplish independently or coordinate with a pain specialist.

Objectives: To assess the safety and feasibility of using 24-hour intravenous patient-controlled analgesia (IV-PCA) to achieve rapid opioid rotation and titration (RORT).

Differential analgesic effects of morphine and gabapentin on behavioural measures of pain and disability in a model of osteoarthritis pain in rats.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is associated with chronic debilitating joint pain. Pain is the result of an emotional and sensory experience and preclinical models of OA can thus be useful to better understand the underlying mechanisms of the disease and test new therapeutic options. We induced unilateral knee OA in Sprague-Dawley rats using monosodium iodoacetate (MIA), a glycolysis inhibitor and assessed the effects of acute and chronic morphine and gabapentin using a battery of quantitative behavioural outcome measures of pain and disability.