Should Rx Opioids Be Limited for Cancer Patients?

By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

At a time when many chronic and acute pain patients are losing access to opioid medication, patients suffering from cancer pain are treated differently. They’re usually exempt from opioid guidelines that typically focus on limiting prescriptions for “noncancer pain.”

But some oncologists are starting to question whether opioids should be routinely prescribed to cancer patients.

“As an oncologist, I cannot help but reflect on that qualifier. It suggests that a cancer diagnosis gives us permission to prescribe opioids with impunity. Patients with cancer can become addicted, like anyone else. Yet oncologists use these potent, seductive drugs freely, perhaps without sufficient regard for the risk of dependence and abuse,” writes Alison Loren, MD, in an op/ed published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“Treating patients who are terminally ill from cancer is an important indication for these drugs. But what about patients with cancer who aren’t dying, the ones we hope to cure? Woven into our language about the opioid epidemic is an implication that oncologists can hand out opioids as if there were no tomorrow. But for many people with cancer, there is now indeed a tomorrow.”

Loren, who is a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, says many patients whose cancer was once thought incurable are living for a decade or longer. Thanks to advances in cancer treatment, there are more than 15 million cancer survivors in U.S. and their ranks are growing

“With this progress comes new challenges. Especially poignant — albeit rare — is the one I face when I see a patient who is cancer-free but addicted to medications I’ve prescribed,” wrote Loren. “I am responsible for this predicament, and it feels monstrously cruel — second only to allowing the dependence to continue. Sometimes, like those with ‘noncancer pain,’ our patients veer into abuse.”

A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine found signs of opioid abuse in a small percentage of cancer patients. Out of 811 patients given opioids after treatment for oral or oropharynx (neck) cancer, 68 patients (7%) were still using opioids six months later.

"You shouldn't need opioids at the six-month point," says Jessica McDermott, MD, an investigator at the CU Cancer Center. “We felt like (opioid misuse) was a long term problem for some of our head and neck cancer patients, but didn’t know how much of problem.”

McDermott doesn’t advocate taking opioids away from cancer patients, but says doctors should know which patients are more at risk of opioid misuse, such as those having a previous opioid prescription or a history of smoking and alcohol use.

"If a patient needed opioids for pain, I wouldn't keep them away, but especially if they have risk factors, I might counsel them more about the risks of addiction and misuse, and keep an eye on it," McDermott says.

Loren would take opioids away from a cancer patient at risk of misuse. She shared the story of a leukemia patient with a long history of substance abuse who was found dead in her hospital bed.

“Her leukemia was in remission. The possibility that she may have overdosed haunts me,” Loren wrote. “Oncologists are accustomed to giving opioids, but we must also be comfortable taking them away, and sometimes giving them in limited doses or not at all.”