Methylnaltrexone for Opioid‐Induced Constipation in Pediatric Oncology Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Pediatric oncology patients can experience opioid-induced constipation, which may not respond to laxative treatment. Methylnaltrexone is an opioid receptor antagonist that can reverse opioid-induced constipation without affecting analgesia. Published literature on the use of methylnaltrexone in children is very limited. This retrospective review describes the effectiveness and safety of methylnaltrexone for opioid-induced constipation in pediatric oncology patients. PROCEDURE: A retrospective review of health records was conducted for pediatric oncology in-patients who were prescribed methylnaltrexone between May 2008 and September 2012 at The Hospital for Sick Children. Demographic, clinical, efficacy, and safety data were collected, including; opioid, laxative, and methylnatrexone dosing and frequency. RESULTS: Fifteen patients (median age: 14 years, range: 4-17 years) received methylnaltrexone; 12 received a single dose while three received multiple doses. At the time of methylnaltrexone administration, patients were receiving a median oral morphine dose equivalent of 5.7 mg/kg/day (range: 1.5-29.2 mg/kg/day) and had not had any bowel movements for several days despite treatment with multiple laxatives. Methylnaltrexone was given at a mean dose of 0.15 ± 0.02 mg/kg/dose (range: 3-12 mg/dose) as a subcutaneous injection. After 14 of 19 doses administered, patients had a bowel movement within 4 hours. Three patients had documented mild gastrointestinal upset following methylnaltrexone administration. None reported a reduction of pain control or opioid withdrawal symptoms. CONCLUSION: This case series suggests that methylnaltrexone is safe and may be effective when given subcutaneously as a 0.15 mg/kg single dose to pediatric oncology patients with opioid-induced constipation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".