Fentanyl sublingual tablets in the treatment of incident breakthrough pain in a patient with advanced cancer – case report

Marcin Janecki

eISSN: 2081-2833
ISSN: 2081-0016

Medycyna Paliatywna/Palliative Medicine

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2/2017
vol. 9

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abstract:

Fentanyl sublingual tablets in the treatment of incident breakthrough pain in a patient with advanced cancer – case report

Marcin Janecki

Medycyna Paliatywna 2017; 9(2): 110–114

Online publish date: 2017/10/30

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Chronic pain is one of the most common symptoms in cancer patients. Due to World Health Organization rules, opioids are the basic treatment for moderate to severe pain. Unfortunatelly, even when the analgesia is quite stable throughout the day, the patients can experience the short, rapid and strong pain flares that are called breakthrough pain (BtP). Breakthrough pain can be either spontaneous or incydent, with maximum intensity reached within short period of time (up to 60 minutes). Because of that, classic short-acting oral opioids may be insufficient in controlling the BtP episodes, and novel, better tailored to pain episodes characterisctics, formulations of transmucosal fentanyl were implemented. In this case report the use of sublingual fentanyl tablets for BtP episodes was described. Drug turned out to be efficacious in a quite small dose – the perfect pain controll was achieved with improvement in quality of life and safety profile.

keywords:

Fentanyl sublingual tablets in the treatment of incident breakthrough pain in a patient with advanced cancer – case report

Marcin Janecki

breakthrough pain, cancer pain, sublingual fentanyl