Confronting Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic: Balancing Societal and Individual Benefits and Risks of Prescription Opioid Use
Abstract
The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two substantial public health challenges—reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can result from the use of opioid medications. In March 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) to convene an ad hoc committee to
• update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education since publication of the 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research, including the evolving role of opioids in pain management;
• characterize the epidemiology of the opioid epidemic and the evidence on strategies for addressing it;
• identify actions the FDA and other organizations can take to respond to the epidemic, with a particular focus on the FDA’s development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring; and
• identify research questions that need to be addressed to assist the FDA in implementing this framework.
RPR Commentary
This is a consensus study report from the National Academy of Medicine’sCommittee on Pain Management and Regulatory Strategies to Address Prescription Opioid Abuse.