Do you really need that opioid prescription?

The dramatic rise in the use of opioid painkillers over the past two decades has been fueled, in part, by doctors prescribing the drugs for pain when more conservative approaches should have been tried first. Now new research shows that doctors sometimes prescribe these powerful, potentially addictive drugs—including OxyContin, Percocet, and Vic...

Solving America’s painkiller paradox

This year, researchers uncovered a simple method for getting doctors to reduce profligate prescriptions of drugs like OxyContin and Percocet that have contributed to America’s opioid epidemic: informing doctors that one of their patients had died. In their study, which was published in Science in August, researchers sent a letter, through the...

Inspired by her own pain, a researcher explores alternatives to opioid treatments

The explosion of deaths related to opioid misuse has underscored a pressing need for better ways of treating pain, especially chronic pain. Duquesne University pharmacology associate professor Jelena Janjic thinks she’s on to one. It involves using a patient’s own immune system to deliver non-opioid pain medication to places in the body...

Spurred by opioid epidemic, new pain drugs may lower the risk of overdose and addiction

As the opioid crisis continues to ravage U.S. communities, scientists and drug companies have intensified their efforts to develop safer and less addictive pain medications. Now, multiple research groups are claiming progress in devising novel opioids—or alternatives—that seem to offer pain relief with far less risk of addiction or of the opioi...