Pain and Opioid Addiction: A Systematic Review and Evaluation of Pain Measurement in Patients with Opioid Dependence on Methadone Maintenance Treatment.

DISCUSSION: The field of addiction medicine is at a lack of consensus as to the real effect of chronic pain on treatment response among opioid dependent patients. Whether it be the lack of a single "gold standard" measurement of response, or a lack of consistent measurement of pain, it is difficult to summarize and compare the results of these relatively small investigations. In comparison to the BPI, use of the simple self-reported pain has lower sensitivity for identifying patients with pain, suggesting the inconsistencies in these studies may result from differences in pain measurement. Future validation studies of pain measurement are required to address the predictive value of self-reported pain. PMID: 27021147 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Current Drug Abuse Reviews - Category: Addiction Tags: Curr Drug Abuse Rev Source Type: research