No abstract

The assessment of addiction-related outcomes is crucial to the management of chronic pain with opioid drugs in all patients. Pain management for patients who have concomitant drug abuse or addiction issues is a particularly complex task involving a need for a common nomenclature as well as empirically derived data to support management strategies during treatment regimens. Complicating the issue is the notion of pseudoaddiction, which is an abuse of medications driven by unrelieved pain that appears on the surface to be very similar to the behavior patterns of addicts. For proper adherence to medical therapy and safety during treatment, it is necessary to address and manage substance abuse-related behaviors. Aberrant drug-taking behavior presents many threats to the integrity of pain treatment. Unfortunately, the current state of the art still has a long way to go before clear guidelines for treatment and management can emerge. What is ultimately needed is a broad-based spectrum of research that highlights the epidemiology of drug-taking behaviors for different medical illnesses ranging from cancer to back pain. This article focuses on some of these issues as well as recounting attempts by our research group to address these issues systematically in hopes of shedding light on the nature of abuse issues in the medically ill. Although advances have been made, there is a definite need for large-scale studies that address the issues of identification and treatment of aberrant behavior in medically ill patients in the effort to provide the best possible outcomes for patients with chronic pain.

Description: Abstract for an article which tests the "Pain Assessment and Documentation Tool" ([glossary]PADT[/glossary]) in its evaluation of the main components of opioid therapy. Authors:

A pilot study was conducted to examine experienced pain physicians' perceptions of aberrant drug taking behaviors. One hundred pain physicians attending a meeting on pain management were asked to rank order (from most aberrant = 1 to least aberrant = 13) a list of aberrant drug-taking behaviors. The sample was comprised mainly of anesthesiologists (50%) and half of the group had 10 or more years of pain management experience. The group prescribed an average of 19-96 opioid medications per week. Practice variables were not related to the rank ordering of the behaviors. All of the various behaviors appeared in all 13 of the rank ordering slots, suggesting a great deal of individual difference in the perception of these behaviors. By examining the average ranking of the behaviors, we noted that physicians' focus on illegal behaviors as the most aberrant followed by the alteration of route of delivery and self-escalation of dose. This survey suggests that an experienced group of pain clinicians does not view aberrant drug related behaviors uniformly. Average rankings suggest clinicians seem to view illegal behavior as the most worrisome. These results must be interpreted with caution due to the small convenience sample, the lack of data on the level of addiction medicine training of the respondents and the lack of data on those physicians who chose not to respond. Further inquiry could be used to guide clinicians' responses to aberrant behaviors when encountered in patients on controlled substances for pain.