New guideline for prescribing opioid pain drugs...( A national panel of pain management ...),Health

A national panel of pain management experts representing the American Pain Society (APS) and the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM) has published the first comprehensive, evidence-based clinical practice guideline to assist clinicians in prescribing potent opioid pain medications for patients with chronic non-cancer pain. The long-awaited guideline appears in the current issue of The Journal of Pain, www.jpain.org.

To create this guideline, researchers in the Oregon Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC) at Oregon Health & Science University collaborated with the APS and AAPM for two years, reviewing more than 8,000 published abstracts and nonpublished studies to assess clinical evidence on which the new recommendations are based.

"This guideline was a true multidisciplinary effort that sought to address in a balanced manner the many challenging issues that clinicians face with regard to when and how to prescribe opioids for chronic noncancer pain," said Roger Chou, M.D., principal investigator; director of the American Pain Society Clinical Practice Guidelines Program; scientific director of the Oregon Evidence-Based Practice Center at OHSU; and associate professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology, and medicine (general internal medicine and geriatrics) in the OHSU School of Medicine.

"A key part of this process was performing a comprehensive literature review to inform the recommendations though an important take-home message is that even though the recommendations represent the best judgment of the panel based on the currently available literature, there is still a lot of research that needs to be done."

The expert panel concluded that opioid pain medications are safe and effective for carefully selected, well-monitored patients with chronic non-cancer pain. They made 25 specific recommendations and achieved unanimous consensus on nearly all.

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