Opioid painkillers triple harmful side effects in people with dementia, a new study finds. Its authors plead for a revision of the dosages in this area.
In a new study, commonly prescribed opioid painkillers have caused harmful side effects to triple in people with dementia. The team, which has seen a significant increase in side effects such as personality changes, confusion and even sedation, is now calling for the dosage of painkillers like buprenorphine to be reassessed for people with dementia.
Buprenorphine
Patients with dementia often suffer from corollary pain. 40% of them take opioid painkillers. The trial, led by the University of Bergen, studied the reactions of 162 people, from 47 Norwegian care homes, all of whom had advanced dementia. Result: compared to the placebo, buprenorphine tripled the harmful side effects and considerably reduced the activity rate of the patients.
“It is very important that we can treat the pain of people with dementia. Unfortunately, we can only make their condition worse at the moment by trying to relieve them. We urgently need to find a sufficient dosage”, warns Clive Ballard , a specialist in neurodegenerative diseases.
Natural opioids
If people with dementia are less tolerant of opioid painkillers, it’s because they overproduce the body’s natural opioids, as another study recently showed on the treatment of arthritis in mice with Alzheimer’s disease.
Currently, 50 million people suffer from dementia worldwide. Due to the aging of the world population, this figure is expected to triple to 152 million by 2050, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Dementia is a general term encompassing a large number of diseases (Creutzfeldt-Jakob, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s…). The common features of the 55 subtypes of dementia are loss of intellectual abilities, deterioration of memory, decline in cognitive functions, language disorders and disturbances in executive functions.
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