ReviewBritish journal of anaesthesia2009
Impact of opioid rescue medication for breakthrough pain on the efficacy and tolerability of long-acting opioids in patients with chronic non-malignant pain.
Review in British journal of anaesthesia, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Individualizing Perioperative Analgesia: Patient-Specific Determinants of Postoperative Pain and Opioid-Related Outcomes.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2026Review
- [Use of rapid-onset fentanyl preparations beyond indication : A random questionnaire survey among congress participants and pain physicians].Schmerz (Berlin, Germany) · 2021Article
- The granulopoietic cytokine granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) induces pain: analgesia by rutin.Inflammopharmacology · 2019Article
- Quercetin reduces Ehrlich tumor-induced cancer pain in mice.Analytical cellular pathology (Amsterdam) · 2015Article
- Targeting the minor pocket of C5aR for the rational design of an oral allosteric inhibitor for inflammatory and neuropathic pain relief.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Article
- [Physicians' knowledge and attitudes concerning the use of opioids in the treatment of chronic cancer and non-cancer pain].Schmerz (Berlin, Germany) · 2010Article
- Identification of novel natural compound inhibitors for human complement component 5a receptor by homology modeling and virtual screening.Medicinal chemistry research : an international journal for rapid communications on design and mechanisms of action of biologically active agentsArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThere is little evidence that short-acting opioids as rescue medication for breakthrough pain is an optimal long-term treatment strategy in chronic non-malignant pain. We compared clinical studies of long-acting opioids that allowed short-acting opioid rescue medication with those that did not, to determine the impact of opioid rescue medication use on the analgesic efficacy and tolerability of chronic opioid therapy in patients with chronic non-malignant pain.
methodsWe searched MEDLINE (1950 to July 2006) and EMBASE (1974 to July 2006) using terms for chronic non-malignant pain and long-acting opioids. Independent review of the search results identified 48 studies that met the study selection criteria. The effect of opioid rescue medication on analgesic efficacy and the incidence of common opioid-related side-effects were analysed using meta-regression.
resultsAfter adjusting for potentially confounding variables (study design and type of opioid), the difference in analgesic efficacy between the 'rescue' and the 'no rescue' studies was not significant, with regression coefficients close to 0 and 95% confidence intervals that excluded an effect of more than 18 points on a 0-100 scale in each case. There was also no significant difference between the 'rescue' and the 'no rescue' studies for the incidence of nausea, constipation, or somnolence in both the unadjusted and the adjusted analyses.
conclusionsWe found no evidence that rescue medication with short-acting opioids for breakthrough pain affects analgesic efficacy of long-acting opioids or the incidence of common opioid-related side-effects among chronic non-malignant pain patients.
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