ReviewAnesthesia and analgesia2017
Alternatives to Opioids in the Pharmacologic Management of Chronic Pain Syndromes: A Narrative Review of Randomized, Controlled, and Blinded Clinical Trials.
Review in Anesthesia and analgesia, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 109 citations in OpenAlex.
- Medical Cannabis and Its Efficacy/Effectiveness for the Treatment of Low-Back Pain: a Systematic Review.Current pain and headache reports · 2023Pooled it
- Analgesic Effects of Cannabinoids for Chronic Non-cancer Pain: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis with Meta-Regression.Journal of neuroimmune pharmacology : the official journal of the Society on NeuroImmune Pharmacology · 2020Pooled it
- Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to Improve the Dysfunction of Descending Pain Modulatory System Related to Opioids in Chronic Non-cancer Pain: An Integrative Review of Neurobiology and Meta-Analysis.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2019Pooled it
- Polypharmacy in spinal cord injury: Matched cohort analysis comparing drug classes, medical complications, and healthcare utilization metrics with 24-month follow-up.The journal of spinal cord medicine · 2025Article
- Review
- Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Charting a Path to Personalized Nonpharmacological and Noninvasive Chronic Pain Management.Journal of pain research · 2025Article
- Opioid analgesics for chronic noncancer pain in patients prescribed opioid agonist therapy or with opioid use disorder: A systematic review.Canadian journal of pain = Revue canadienne de la douleur · 2025Review
- Light-Inducible Activation of TrkA for Probing Chronic Pain in Mice.ACS chemical biology · 2024Article
- Novel digital approaches to the assessment of problematic opioid use.BioData mining · 2022Review
- Article
- Temporal Trends in Opioid Prescribing Patterns Among Oncologists in the Medicare Population.Journal of the National Cancer Institute · 2021Article
- Chronic Scrotal Content Pain: a Review of the Literature and Management Schemes.Current urology reports · 2021Review
- From Silos to Solidarity: Case Study of a Patient-Centered, Integrative Approach to Opioid Tapering and Chronic Pain Mitigation in a Multidisciplinary AIDS Clinic.Journal of AIDS and HIV treatment · 2021Article
- Identifying cases of chronic pain using health administrative data: A validation study.Canadian journal of pain = Revue canadienne de la douleur · 2020Article
- Lessons for Better Pain Management in the Future: Learning from the Past.Pain and therapy · 2020Review
- Longitudinal trends in nonmedical prescription opioid use in a cohort of rural Appalachian people who use drugs.Preventive medicine · 2020Article
- Physical Therapy for Chronic Pain Mitigation and Opioid Use Reduction Among People Living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus in Atlanta, GA: A Descriptive Case Series.AIDS research and human retroviruses · 2020Article
- Pain in child patients: A review on managements.European journal of translational myology · 2020Article
- An Electronic Clinical Decision Support System for the Management of Low Back Pain in Community Pharmacy: Development and Mixed Methods Feasibility Study.JMIR medical informatics · 2020Article
- Multidisciplinary Pain Management for Pediatric Patients with Acute and Chronic Pain: A Foundational Treatment Approach When Prescribing Opioids.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Chronic pain exerts a tremendous burden on individuals and societies. If one views chronic pain as a single disease entity, then it is the most common and costly medical condition. At present, medical professionals who treat patients in chronic pain are recommended to provide comprehensive and multidisciplinary treatments, which may include pharmacotherapy. Many providers use nonopioid medications to treat chronic pain; however, for some patients, opioid analgesics are the exclusive treatment of chronic pain. However, there is currently an epidemic of opioid use in the United States, and recent guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have recommended that the use of opioids for nonmalignant chronic pain be used only in certain circumstances. The goal of this review was to report the current body of evidence-based medicine gained from prospective, randomized-controlled, blinded studies on the use of nonopioid analgesics for the most common noncancer chronic pain conditions. A total of 9566 studies were obtained during literature searches, and 271 of these met inclusion for this review. Overall, while many nonopioid analgesics have been found to be effective in reducing pain for many chronic pain conditions, it is evident that the number of high-quality studies is lacking, and the effect sizes noted in many studies are not considered to be clinically significant despite statistical significance. More research is needed to determine effective and mechanism-based treatments for the chronic pain syndromes discussed in this review. Utilization of rigorous and homogeneous research methodology would likely allow for better consistency and reproducibility, which is of utmost importance in guiding evidence-based care.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.