Objective: Previous literature suggests that increases in the medical use of opioids over the early 1990s did not contribute to increased morbidity secondary to opioid abuse. Our objective was to evaluate the period 1997-2001 to analyze trends in medical use and medical abuse of three classes of opioid analgesics that are commonly used in sustained-release formulations: fentanyl, morphine, and oxycodone.
Design And Setting: A retrospective analysis of the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) database and the Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS) database for the years 1997-2001 was used for this study.
Results: The analysis of the DAWN database showed that there was an 83.5% increase in all opioid analgesic mentions from 1997 to 2001. Mentions involving any fentanyl compound increased 249.8%, any morphine compound increased 161.8%, and any oxycodone-containing compound increased 267.3%. Mentions of each of these three classes of opioids remained less than 2% of all total drug mentions per year for each year studied. Medical use of the selected opioid classes, as reported in the ARCOS database and measured by grams distributed, all increased substantially (fentanyl 151.2%, morphine 48.8%, oxycodone 347.9%).
Conclusion: Using this method of analysis, the rates of drug abuse, and resultant morbidity secondary to the use of opioid analgesics, remain low in spite of the increase in medical use of these substances.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-4637.2004.04001.x | DOI Listing |
BMC Med
January 2025
Primary Care Centre Versus Arthritis, School of Medicine, Keele University, Keele, UK.
Background: Pain is a major challenge for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), with many people suffering chronic pain. Current RA management guidelines focus on assessing and reducing disease activity using disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs). Consequently, pain care is often suboptimal, with growing evidence that analgesics are widely prescribed to patients with RA, despite potential toxicities and limited evidence for efficacy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
January 2025
Washington DC VA Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA.
The opioid crisis has disproportionately affected U.S. veterans, leading the Veterans Health Administration to implement opioid prescribing guidelines.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClin Drug Investig
January 2025
Cali Biosciences, US, LLC, San Diego, CA, USA.
Background And Objective: There is a significant medical need for improved long-acting local anesthetics to decrease postsurgical pain and reduce postoperative opioid use. While ropivacaine is considered a safer local anesthetic than bupivacaine, no long-acting ropivacaine formulation is currently marketed. Available formulations of bupivacaine show inconsistent pharmacokinetics (PK) among different surgical models, and inconsistency in PK may lead to a reluctance to use the medication owing to fear of local anesthetic systemic toxicity (LAST) or unreliable efficacy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropharmacology
January 2025
Department of Pharmacology, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, 78229, USA. Electronic address:
Kappa opioid receptors (KOR) expressed by peripheral pain-sensing neurons (nociceptors) are a promising target for development of effective and safer analgesics for inflammatory pain that are devoid of central nervous system adverse effects. Here we sought to delineate the signaling pathways that underlie peripheral KOR-mediated antinociception in adult male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. In an inflammatory model of pain, local intraplantar (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioorg Chem
January 2025
School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University, Jinan 250012, China. Electronic address:
An alternative approach for the management of acute and chronic pains involves prolonging the half-life of endogenous opiates, such as enkephalins that are released in response to nociceptive stimuli. This can be achieved through the inhibition of enzymatic pathways responsible for the hydrolysis of these peptides, particularly targeting Aminopeptidase N (APN) and Neutral Endopeptidase (NEP). In this study, we designed and synthesized a series of dual enkephalinase inhibitors (DENKIs) targeting both APN and NEP as novel analgesic treatments.
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