Buprenorphine for Cancer Pain: Results from a Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Buprenorphine may be safer and better-tolerated than full mu opioid receptor (MOR) agonists. Whether it effectively controls cancer-related pain is unclear. A prior review (Cochrane 2015) did not support prioritizing buprenorphine over full MOR agonists for cancer-associated pain. PURPOSE/HYPOTHESIS: We conducted an updated systematic review of buprenorphine's effect on cancer- related pain including both new studies and additional study designs. Procedures/data/observations: We searched Cochrane, OVID Medline, EMBASE, EBSCO and Web of Science for studies published in any language up to May 2023 for studies that examined buprenorphine's impact upon pain severity/intensity in patients with active cancer. Risk of bias and study quality were assessed using the Cochrane Collaboration tool for randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale for cohort and casecontrol studies. Data were synthesized using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) criteria. CONCLUSIONS/APPLICATIONS: 2322 publications were identified and 42 studies were included (14 RCTs, 10 pre-post uncontrolled, 5 cohort, and 2 case-control studies). All had moderate-high risk of bias. One RCT showed buprenorphine was superior to placebo. 11 RCTs (12 papers) showed buprenorphine was as effective as full MOR agonists for cancer pain. 10-30 percent of cancer patients trialing buprenorphine did not achieve adequate response.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".