OBJECTIVE To evaluate driving performance, cognition, and balance in patients with chronic nonmalignant pain before and after the addition of transdermal fentanyl to their treatments. DESIGN Prospective, one-group pretest-posttest design. SETTING Outpatient pain center associated with a large, urban medical school. INTERVENTIONS Patients taking less than a 15-mg equivalent of oxycodone pe...

CONTEXT Patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) with morphine is commonly used to provide acute postoperative pain control after major surgery. The fentanyl hydrochloride patient-controlled transdermal system eliminates the need for venous access and complicated programming of pumps. OBJECTIVE To assess the efficacy and safety of an investigational patient-controlled iontophoretic transdermal syst...

We describe here a patient who obtained a good analgesic effect with high-dose fentanyl patches for controlling cancer pain. A 52-year-old man was referred to our hospital because of severe cancer pain that was 7/10 on a numeric rating scale (NRS). He had been diagnosed with locally advanced cholangiocarcinoma 3 months previously. We prescribed weak opioids and an antidepressant, but his pain w...

Effective pain relief is an essential component of a patient's peri-operative care package. Good analgesia has been shown to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular, respiratory and thrombo-embolic complications following surgery. Satisfactory analgesia facilitates early patient ambulation following surgery, which may reduce in-patient stay. Patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) systems are a well ...

Skin electroporation has recently been shown to increase transdermal transport of small-size drugs as well as considerably larger molecules by up to 4 orders of magnitude in vitro. Nevertheless, no in vivo studies have proven that high-voltage pulses can induce therapeutic plasma levels of drug. The aim of the present report was precisely to study the potential of skin electroporation in transd...

INTRODUCTION: Dissolution is the required characterization test to evaluate new materials for transdermal drug delivery [1]. However the conventional dissolution tests, recommended by United State Pharmacopeia (USP), cannot provide results with good correlation with in vivo drug release, especially for patches that mainly depends on skin resistance to drug diffusion [2]. Other dissolution metho...