ATLANTA—Rheumatic diseases have been the subject of a range of public health campaigns and reports over the past decade, but improving their visibility remains a work in progress, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expert said at the 2019 ACR/ARP Annual Meeting. A growing attention to pain and the opioid crisis may help…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—In patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain, an increase in opioid dosage appears to be of no clear benefit, according to a two-year study. As Benjamin J. Morasco, PhD, tells Reuters Health by email, “When we followed patients with chronic pain, who were already prescribed long-term opioid therapy, we found patients as a…
FDA advisory committees rejected the new drug application for oxycodegol, an opioid analgesic, due to a lack of data regarding it’s potential for abuse…
ATLANTA—The potential of cannabis‐based medicines is a hot topic, particularly as pain management therapy for arthritis and other conditions. However, confusion abounds regarding its therapeutic potential, how it can be administered and even the correct terminology to use. David P. Finn, PhD, professor of pharmacology and therapeutics, and founding co-director of the Centre for Pain…
In a second response letter, the FDA has cited the onset and duration of intravenous meloxicam, a non-opioid pain treatment, as concerns that it fails to meet prescriber expectations…
Over the past decade, physicians, patients and policy makers have expressed increasing concern about the high frequency of opioids being prescribed and the association between opioid use and poor outcomes. Rates of opioid prescriptions in the general population rose considerably from the 1990s through 2010, with a plateau in the early 2010s. In 2015, 38%…
CHICAGO—Rheumatology healthcare providers should embrace collaborative approaches to manage chronic musculoskeletal pain in older adult patients, including models of care that involve multiple providers, patients and their caregivers. That was the message delivered by two speakers in the Interdisciplinary Management of Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain in Older Adults session at the 2018 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting. “As…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Many U.S. clinicians aren’t following risk-mitigation practices for opioid prescribing, new findings show. “In response to this national opioid crisis, consensus-based safer opioid prescribing guidelines have been published and state laws regulating opioid prescribing practices have been enacted,” Daniel P. Alford, MD, of Boston University School of Medicine, and colleagues write in…