Systematic Reviews
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2024. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Orthop. Sep 18, 2024; 15(9): 882-890
Published online Sep 18, 2024. doi: 10.5312/wjo.v15.i9.882
Pain management in acute musculoskeletal injury: Effect of opioid vs nonopioid medications
Marco Fiore, Luigi Aurelio Nasto, Eleni McCaffery, Fannia Barletta, Angela Visconti, Francesca Gargano, Enrico Pola, Maria Caterina Pace
Marco Fiore, Maria Caterina Pace, Department of Women, Child and General and Specialized Surgery, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Naples 80138, Italy
Luigi Aurelio Nasto, Enrico Pola, Department of Orthopaedics, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Naples 80138, Italy
Eleni McCaffery, Department of Emergency Medicine, New York Presbyterian-Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, New York, NY 11215, United States
Fannia Barletta, Department of Anesthesia and Intensive Care, “San Carlo” Hospital, Potenza 85100, Italy
Angela Visconti, Department of Anaesthesia, "San Giuliano” Hospital, Giugliano 80014, Italy
Francesca Gargano, Unit of Anesthesia and Intensive Care, The Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Campus Bio-Medico, Rome 00128, Italy
Author contributions: Fiore M designed the study and wrote the manuscript; Barletta F and Visconti A evaluated the eligible studies via initial screening; Gargano F prepared the manuscript; McCaffery E performed the English language check; and Nasto LA, Pola E, and Pace MC supervised the research; all authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. They did not receive any funding for the work undertaken.
PRISMA 2009 Checklist statement: The authors have read the PRISMA 2009 Checklist, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the PRISMA 2009 Checklist.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Marco Fiore, MD, Doctor, Lecturer, Professor, Department of Women, Child and General and Specialized Surgery, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Piazza Miraglia 2, Naples 80138, Italy. marco.fiore@unicampania.it
Received: June 30, 2024
Revised: July 19, 2024
Accepted: August 5, 2024
Published online: September 18, 2024
Processing time: 73 Days and 20.1 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Opioid use is linked to an increased risk of developing opioid use disorder. This systematic review question is “How does the use of opioid medications in pain management, compared with non-opioid medications, affect pain intensity over the short, intermediate, and long-term in adults with acute traumatic pain?”. The search was performed using Medline and Google Scholar. We included 14 studies in the final synthesis [12 were randomized clinical trials (RCTs) and 2 were pseudo-RCTs]. Most retrieved studies on the use of non-opioids concluded that non-opioid drugs are non-inferior to opioids for the control of acute pain in acute musculoskeletal injury.