background: opioid drugs are the most effective drugs for the treatment of moderate to severe pain. rates of opioid use are influenced by a variety of factors. the aim of this study was to determine the pattern of use of parenteral opioid drugs in hospitalized patients in a referral teaching hospital. methods: in a retrospective study, required data were extracted from medical records of adult ...

Loperamide, a mu opioid receptor agonist, which is commonly used as an antidiarrhoeal agent has been reported to possess analgesic activity after intrathecal administration. However, the exact analgesic profile, i.e., onset, duration and intensity of analgesia in relation to morphine is not fully known. In the present study, the acute analgesic effect of loperamide (5 microg) was compared with ...

The cloning of a fourth member of the opioid receptor family has led to the discovery of a new neuropeptide termed orphanin FQ or nociceptin (OFQ/N). Studies in CD-1 mice confirm the ability of OFQ/N to rapidly induce hyperalgesia within 15 min which is insensitive to opioid antagonists. This is followed in the next 30 min by loss of hyperalgesia and the appearance of analgesia in the tailflick...

Opioids are broad spectrum analgesics that may be beneficial to alleviate the intense perception of algesia in patients suffering with pain. They have been one of the most controversial analgesics, in part because of their potential for addiction. Opioids or any currently available analgesic will not provide effective analgesia for every patient with chronic neuropathic pain (NP), but overall o...

Opioid dose escalation or analgesic tolerance is observed during longer treatments in a significant number of patients with chronic pain owing to cancer or nonmalignant tissue injury. Higher doses of morphine are more likely to result in subsensitivity to the drug and worsened quality of life (QOL) by exerting other side effects. Many investigators have been studying the molecular and cellular ...

INTRODUCTION Balanced analgesia, using both opioid and nonopioids agents, has become the standard care for postoperative pain management. Ketamine, a compound with analgesic and antihyperalgesic properties, has been shown to decrease postoperative pain and opioid requirements in adults. The goal of the present meta-analysis was to investigate postoperative analgesic properties of ketamine in pe...

Since the first cases of severe and fatal liver damage were reported in 1966,1,2 overdose of paracetamol has become the cause of 100–200 deaths in the UK each year.3 Paracetamol toxicity remains the leading cause of fulminant hepatic failure in the UK and is a common reason for liver transplantation.4,5 Knowledge of the toxic mechanism (Fig 1) has led to effective antidotes which provide substr...

Opioid receptors mediate the strong analgesic and addictive actions of exogenous opiates, the prototype of which is morphine. The opioid system consists of a family of endogenous opioid peptides and three receptor types, m, d and k. It is widely distributed throughout the CNS and regulates a large diversity of physiological functions, including pain perception and mood control. The recent cloni...

μ-Opioid agonists mediate their analgesic effect through GPCRs that are generated via alternate splicing of the Oprm1 transcript. While the majority of μ-opioids interact with receptors comprising the canonical 7 transmembrane (7TM) domain, a recently identified class of μ-opioids appears to require a 6TM domain variant. In this issue of the JCI, Lu and colleagues provide an in vivo proof-of-co...

Pain represents a complex experience which can be approached by various medicines. Non-opioid and opioid analgesics are the most common drugs used to manage different types of pain. The increased attention nowadays to pain management entailed concomitantly more frequent adverse drug reactions (ADRs) related to analgesic use. Drug-drug interactions can be sometimes responsible for the adverse ef...