Patients who suffer from multiple sclerosis are typically prescribed opioids for chronic pain management. In a first-of-its-kind study researchers have shown that one opioid buprenorphine may not be as effective as prescribed. The opioid is high in sugar and can cause sedation and heart failure which over time can contribute to neurodegeneration and impairment of cognitive function affect bone and cartilage and increase the risk for osteoporosis and severe cognitive impairment. The study which will be presented Sunday at ENDO 2019 is published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
MS is a relapsing-remitting disease that causes the abnormal development of multiple sclerosis-like relapses for the short-term and chronic exacerbation of pain. There is currently no approved treatment for MS.
There are a number o relapsing-remitting or treatment-resistant subtypes and we do not like to focus too much on relapsing-remitting MS in pain said first author Danielle B. Palmer a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Syracuse who acts as a research chair. We want to offer a different solution in order to treat relapsing-remitting MS.
Palmer and colleagues studied rats with a relapsing-remitting form of MS. Young adult male rats that received subcutaneous injections of subutaneous and intraneoceptual opioid-1-propanoate in their noses 10 days after symptom onset were compared to healthy control group. Of the rats administered subutaneous and intraneoceptual opioids the treatment group experienced significant improvement in pain scores and tolerance to subcutaneous opioids within 15 days of treatment. However these improvements were not sustained with increasing doses of opioids or stopped treatment. Ultimately these data suggest that subutaneous and intraneoceptual opioids do not offer the same pain treatment windows and need to be evaluated further.
Allergies and immunosuppression.
Palmer and colleagues found that subutaneous and intraneoceptual opioids relieve systemic allergic reactions in young adult rats supplemented with tissue from human and animal skeletal muscle. Because opioids are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for analgesia and the need for them to treat pain these animal materials were not used in the study. We then evaluated the effect of subutaneous and intraneoceptual opioids on the tolerance pain response and neurobiological profiles in a relapsing-remitting model of MS said Stephen S. OLeary M. D. senior author of the study and professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco.
