• Tessa Lefebvre, Laura Tack, Michelle Lycke, Fréderic Duprez, Laurence Goethals, Sylvie Rottey, Lieselot Cool, Koen Van Eygen, Brendon Stubbs, Patricia Schofield, Hans Pottel, Tom Boterberg, and Philip Debruyne.
• Department of Medical Oncology, Kortrijk Cancer Centre, General Hospital Groeninge, Kortrijk, Belgium.
• Pain Med. 2021 Feb 4; 22 (1): 152-164.

ObjectiveOur aim was to give an overview of the effectiveness of adjunctive analgesics in head and neck cancer (HNC) patients receiving (chemo-) radiotherapy.DesignSystematic review.InterventionsThis systematic review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, and ClinicalTrials.gov were searched for studies concerning "head neck cancer," "adjunctive analgesics," "pain," and "radiotherapy."Outcome MeasuresPain outcome, adverse events, and toxicity and other reported outcomes, for example, mucositis, quality of life, depression, etc.ResultsNine studies were included in our synthesis. Most studies were of low quality and had a high risk of bias on several domains of the Cochrane Collaboration tool. Only two studies comprised high-quality randomized controlled trials in which pregabalin and a doxepin rinse showed their effectiveness for the treatment of neuropathic pain and pain from oral mucositis, respectively, in HNC patients receiving (chemo-) radiotherapy.ConclusionsMore high-quality trials are necessary to provide clear evidence on the effectiveness of adjunctive analgesics in the treatment of HNC (chemo-) radiation-induced pain.© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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