Opioid antagonists: clinical utility, pharmacology, safety, and tolerability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Opioid antagonists block opioid receptors, a mechanism associated with utility in several therapeutic indications. Here, we review the sites of action, clinical uses, pharmacology, and general safety profiles of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved opioid antagonists. A review of the literature and product labels of opioid antagonists was conducted. The unique clinical uses of approved opioid antagonists are related to their ability to block opioid receptors centrally and/or peripherally. Centrally acting opioid antagonists treat opioid and alcohol use disorders (AUDs) and reverse opioid overdose. Because the opioid system influences weight and metabolism, one opioid antagonist combination product is approved for chronic weight management; another, approved for adults with schizophrenia or bipolar I disorder, mitigates olanzapine-associated weight gain. Peripherally acting opioid antagonists are approved for opioid-induced constipation; another accelerates gastrointestinal recovery after bowel surgery. Opioid antagonists are generally well tolerated; they are not associated with physiologic dependence or abuse. However, opioid antagonists can precipitate acute opioid withdrawal in patients using or undergoing withdrawal from opioid agonists. Likewise, their use can confer a risk for opioid overdose if attempts are made to overcome opioid antagonist blockade of opioid receptors via the intake of additional opioids. Opioid receptor antagonists have diverse therapeutic benefits based on their respective pharmacology and sites of action; understanding their respective nuances facilitates the safe and effective use of these agents.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".