Chronic pain problems are one of the most frequent complaints from emergency room visitors. Fifteen hospitals are now testing a new kind of pain reliever in the form of nasal spray.

The trial

Sprix, which is made Regency Therapeutics, was approved by the FDA for short-term pain management. Doctors will prescribe this new product and follow the progress of patients for 18 months.

“Moderate to moderately severe pain is one of the most common reasons patients seek care in emergency departments, but emergency department clinicians often do not provide adequate treatment of pain because of ingrained prescribing habits and concerns about the appropriate use of narcotic analgesics,” Charles Pollack, MD, Professor and Chairman, Department of Emergency Medicine, Pennsylvania Hospital, University of Pennsylvania Health System told American News Report. “One of the goals of our study is to understand the overall impact of acute pain and its different treatments on patients after they leave the emergency department, including patient satisfaction, quality of life, and back-to-work/normal activities outcomes.”

Preventing abuse

The main ingredient in Sprix is not habit forming, according to its makers. Researchers believe this could be a significant benefit.

“We are very interested in comparing the response of emergency room patients to Sprix vs. narcotics during the management of acute moderate to moderately severe pain. By providing funds to a group of academically oriented emergency medicine physicians to design and carry out this trial, we felt we could obtain high quality information of interest to both of us,” said David Bregman, MD, Medical Director of Luitpold Pharmaceuticals, the parent company of Regency Therapeutics.

“The emergency department, unfortunately, can be a gateway for the misuse and abuse of narcotics. As emergency care providers, we need to balance the real need to treat acute pain, but also manage our responsibility to our patients,” said Knox H. Todd, MD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine,UniversityofTexas MD Anderson Cancer Center.