Morphine patch for cancer pain

Talk to your doctor or nurse about effective contraception before starting treatment. People taking morphine for weeks or months can develop a physical dependence on the drug.

This causes withdrawal symptoms if the drug is stopped. Your doctor or nurse will advise you how to reduce the morphine dose gradually if necessary. Don't stop taking morphine suddenly. Some people can also develop a psychological dependence addiction to morphine. This may be more likely in people who have problems with alcohol or drug use. For further information about this treatment go to the electronic Medicines Compendium eMC website.

Coping with cancer can be difficult. There is help and support available. Find out about the emotional, physical and practical effects of cancer and how to manage them. Cancer drugs have side effects and these can vary from person to person. But there are things that you can do to help you cope. There are different causes and types of cancer pain, and many different ways of managing and treating it.

Whatever painkillers you have to treat cancer pain, it helps to know more about what you're taking and any possible side effects.

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Skip to main content. Opioids block pain messages from travelling along the nerves to the brain. How you have it Morphine is available in different forms such as: tablets or capsules liquids injections suppositories Morphine tablets or capsules Many people take morphine as tablets or capsules.

Short acting morphine Short acting morphine lasts for 2 to 4 hours per dose. Long acting morphine Long acting morphine lasts from 12 to 24 hours per dose. You take it either once or twice a day. Before starting to use painkilling patches, you and your doctor should agree the goals of your treatment.

This could include being able to carry out a particular activity. The next step is to try a prescription for short-term opioids, such as low-dose oral morphine more-feen , for a week or so.

This will help you find out if opioids are likely to help you. You can wash the area you stick the patch with cold or lukewarm water. Do not use soap, cream, oil or lotions, as this may stop the patch from sticking to your skin.

Also try to put the patch in different places each time you use it, as using it on the same area of skin each time may cause a rash. Each patch is different, so make sure you read the patient information leaflet, as this will tell you how long to leave it on for. After removing the patch, you may still feel the effects for a few hours. Do not apply extra patches. It is important that only the prescribed amount is worn at any one time. Fentanyl patches should not be prescribed to patients who have not used opioid treatments before, such as morphine.

Certain drugs may interact with painkilling patches. Several preliminary data suggested that partial opioid rotation and opioid combinations may be beneficial for patients with a poor analgesic effect after dose escalation [ 10 ]. Yet for our patient, adding the second opioid failed to achieve a good analgesic effect. However, this huge dose had no effect for relieving her from neuropathic pain.

At this dose, the patient could obtain good pain control during the last 2 weeks of his life, with no exacerbation of side effects. To the best of our knowledge, we have reported here on the highest dose of transdemal fentanyl that was successfully used for a patient suffering from visceral cancer pain. Our experience suggests that if it is needed for controlling cancer pain, administering high-doses of opioids should not be feared.

However, orally administering this dose of opioids inevitably requires a large amount of tablets to be taken daily, which may induce more side effects and make patients uncomfortable. Therefore, high doses of fentanyl patches may be a good choice for those patients who need a megadose of opioids to control their cancer pain.

No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Korean J Intern Med. Published online Aug Find articles by Jung Han Kim. Find articles by Mi Kim. Find articles by Chong Won Sung. Find articles by Hyeoung Su Kim. Find articles by Hyun Joo Jang. Find articles by Young Chul Shin. Find articles by Joo Young Jung. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer.

Corresponding author. Correspondence to Jung Han Kim, M. Tel: , Fax: , moc. In this updated review we set out to estimate how well morphine worked, how many people had side effects, and how severe those side effects were — for example, whether they were so severe that participants stopped taking their oral morphine.

We found 62 studies with participants. The studies were often small, compared many different preparations, and used different study designs. This made it difficult to work out whether any one tablet or preparation of oral morphine was better than any other.

There did not seem to be much difference between them. More than 9 in 10 participants had pain that went from moderate or severe before taking morphine to pain that was no worse than mild when taking morphine.

More than 6 in 10 participants were very satisfied with the morphine treatment, or considered the result to be very good or excellent. Only about 1 person in 20 stopped taking morphine because of side effects.

Morphine is associated with some unwanted effects, mainly constipation, and nausea and vomiting. At one level these are good results. On another level, the quality of studies is generally poor and we could wish for more consistency in study design, and especially in study reporting, which should include the outcome of pain reduced to tolerable levels — no worse than mild pain — so that people with cancer are not bothered by pain.

The conclusions have not changed for this update. The effectiveness of oral morphine has stood the test of time, but the randomised trial literature for morphine is small given the importance of this medicine. Most trials recruited fewer than participants and did not provide appropriate data for meta-analysis. The review demonstrates the wide dose range of morphine used in studies, and that a small percentage of participants are unable to tolerate oral morphine.

The review also shows the wide range of study designs, and inconsistency in cross-over designs.