-
Observational Study
Management of severe chronic pain with tapentadol prolonged release - long-term data from pain specialists.
- Volker Strick.
- Pain Clinic Rodenkirchen , Cologne , Germany.
- Curr Med Res Opin. 2014 Oct 1;30(10):2085-92.
Background And ObjectiveClinical trials have documented the efficacy and good tolerability of tapentadol prolonged released (PR) for severe chronic pain. This study investigated routine long-term administration by pain specialists.MethodsThe effectiveness analysis included prospective data collected over a 3 month period (cohort I, n = 1457, mean age 61.2 ± 13 years) and over a 12 month period (cohort II, n = 588, 60.1 ± 13.2 years) regarding previous and concomitant analgesic treatment, tapentadol dosage, pain intensity, sleep and quality of life parameters, and tolerability.ResultsMost patients (>77%) had suffered from severe chronic pain for ≥2 years with low back pain the main pain diagnosis (82%); 91% had already received analgesic long-term treatment prior to initiation of tapentadol therapy (42% of those received strong opioids). After 3 month tapentadol treatment, cohort I had experienced a mean pain reduction of 2.4 points (from 6.8 ± 1.6 at baseline) and improvements of 2.1 points in quality of sleep (from 5.8 ± 2.5) and quality of life (from 6.5 ± 2; all p ≤ 0.001). The 12 month tapentadol treatment (cohort II) reduced the mean pain intensity by 3.2 points from 6.7 ± 1.6 at baseline (NRS-11; p ≤ 0.001); 57% of the patients experienced clinically relevant pain relief of ≥50%. At end of observation, 92% attained either their intended pain reduction and/or an additional individual treatment target, both predefined at start of tapentadol therapy. This was accompanied by a significant reduction in pain-related impairments in daily activities and an improvement in quality of life (all p ≤ 0.001). Most frequent side-effects were nausea (6.3% of patients) and dizziness (3.8%) for cohort I, and nausea (1.5%) and constipation (1.2%) for cohort II.ConclusionTapentadol PR is effective and well tolerated and can be considered an alternative to classical strong opioids in long-term chronic pain therapy.LimitationsThe study lacks a control group; assessment under routine practice conditions, however, reflects daily practice clinical management conditions.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*
,_underline_
or**bold**
. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>
and subscript<sub>text</sub>
. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3.
, hyphens-
or asterisks*
. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
- Images can be included with:
![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
- For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)
inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]
to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote.
.