Methadone switching for refractory cancer pain

Methadone is commonly considered an alternative opioid treatment for refractory cancer pain. This study aims to investigate the efficacy, safety, and cost of methadone in the treatment of refractory cancer pain. A retrospective study was conducted in patients who used methadone for refractory cancer...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BMC palliative care 2022-11, Vol.21 (1), p.191-7, Article 191
Main Authors: Ding, Haiying, Song, Yu, Xin, Wenxiu, Sun, Jiao, Zhong, Like, Zhou, Qinfei, He, Chaoneng, Gong, Liyan, Fang, Luo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analgesics
Analgesics, Opioid
Breakthrough Pain
Cancer
Cancer Pain - drug therapy
Cardiac arrhythmia
Cost
Costs
Delirium
Efficacy
Fentanyl
Hospice care
Humans
Metastasis
Methadone
Methadone - adverse effects
Methadone - therapeutic use
Morphine
Multivariate analysis
Narcotics
Neoplasms - complications
Opioids switching
Pain
Palliative care
Patients
Ratios
Refractory cancer pain
Retrospective Studies
Safety
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Summary:Methadone is commonly considered an alternative opioid treatment for refractory cancer pain. This study aims to investigate the efficacy, safety, and cost of methadone in the treatment of refractory cancer pain. A retrospective study was conducted in patients who used methadone for refractory cancer pain from April 2016 to December 2020 at a cancer specialized hospital. Pain control, evaluated via pain score and breakthrough pain frequency, and adverse events of methadone were compared with analgesic regimens prior to methadone administration. The factors potentially affecting the switching outcome were analyzed via multivariate analysis. Moreover, the cost of pain control was estimated. Ninety patients received methadone for poor pain control (74.4%), intolerable adverse events (10.0%), or both (15.6%) after prior opioid treatments. Sixty-four patients (71.1%) were successfully switched to methadone with median pain score significantly decreased from 4.0 to 2.0 (p 
ISSN:1472-684X
1472-684X
DOI:10.1186/s12904-022-01076-2