• Int J Palliat Nurs · Jul 2007

    Treating cancer-related breakthrough pain: the oral transmucosal route.

    • Diane Laverty.
    • Bereavement Services, Royal Free Hospital, London, UK. diane.laverty@ntlworld.com
    • Int J Palliat Nurs. 2007 Jul 1;13(7):326-31.

    AbstractBetween 40 and 80% of patients with advanced cancer experience breakthrough pain (BTP), a sudden, rapidly escalating flare of pain occurring against a background of otherwise well-controlled persistent pain. Patients often have up to four episodes of BTP each day, with a typical episode reaching its peak intensity in three to five minutes and lasting about 30 minutes in total. It is essential to provide fast and effective relief since BTP reduces the quality of life of patients and their families, and increases health care costs. The usual approach is to treat BTP with a short-acting, 'normal release' oral opioid, but this is absorbed too slowly to treat the typical episode of BTP. As this article explains, oral transmucosal fentanyl citrate (Actiq) is an effective strong opioid that has a rapid onset and short duration of action that closely matches the characteristics of an episode of BTP.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    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..

    hide…