People who took the opioid oxycodone or a placebo for six weeks reported similar pain scores for acute discomfort in their lower back or neck
By Chen Ly
28 June 2023
Acute lower back and neck pain affect millions of people worldwide
Natalia Gdovskaia/Getty Images
Opioids are no more effective at relieving short-term lower-back and neck pain than placebos.
This type of discomfort is widespread, affecting up to 500 million people globally, says Andrew McLachlan at the University of Sydney in Australia. Worldwide, doctors commonly prescribe opioids to address this, a class of painkiller that includes the drugs morphine, oxycodone and fentanyl.
Opioids can be highly addictive, which may lead to drug abuse. “There’s been a global move to readdress the appropriate use of opioids because we know they carry a significant burden of harm,” says McLachlan.
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Previous research has found that opioids provide some benefit for chronic lower-back pain, but no studies had looked at acute lower-back pain or any duration of neck pain. To learn more, McLachlan and his colleagues recruited 347 people with acute lower back or neck pain between 2016 and 2021.
For up to six weeks, half of the participants were randomly assigned to take a daily dose of oxycodone and the medicine naloxone, which offsets some opioid side effects, while the other half took a placebo. The doctors also gave all of the participants typical pain management advice, such as keeping active.
Before the trial, those assigned to the opioid group rated their pain as 5.7, on average, out of 10, compared with 5.6 for the placebo group. After six weeks, their average scores were 2.78 and 2.25, respectively. These weren’t found to be significantly different in a statistical analysis, suggesting that the opioid and placebo were as effective as each other.