Post-mortem oxycodone blood concentrations of hospitalized cancer and surgery patients compared with fatal poisonings.

Oxycodone is a strong opioid drug commonly used to treat acute, cancer, and chronic non-malignant pain. In this study, all oxycodone-related medico-legal cases where death had occurred in a hospital or nursing home in Finland were investigated to determine the range of post-mortem (PM) oxycodone blood concentrations in a therapeutic setting. All toxicology cases in which oxycodone was detected in PM femoral blood during the 4-year period of 2016-2019 in Finland were retrieved from the national PM toxicology database. In this material, the 365 deceased hospital patient cases that met the study inclusion criteria were divided into four groups according to the cause and manner of death. The reference group of 121 fatal oxycodone poisoning cases comprised two groups: those with verified associated drug abuse and those without drug abuse. The median oxycodone concentration in PM blood was significantly higher in cancer patients (0.10 mg/L) than in patients with recent surgery (0.07 mg/L) or other disease (0.06 mg/L) (p < 0.05). In addition, the median oxycodone concentration was significantly lower in all hospital patient groups than in the poisoning groups, the latter displaying 0.38 mg/L (abuse) and 0.64 mg/L (no abuse) (p < 0.001). This study shows that half of the subjects in the cancer patient group had PM blood oxycodone concentrations above the typical clinical therapeutic plasma concentration range (0.005-0.10 mg/L). Appropriate medication of hospitalized surgery and cancer patients can result in concentrations of up to 0.2 and 0.6 mg/L, respectively, while higher concentrations are exceptional.

Research on the applications of wireless analgesic system in anesthesiology department / 中国医学装备

Objective:The effect of Wireless Analgesia System for the patients with postoperative pain, chronic pain and cancer pain in Anesthesiology Department will be discussed in this article. Methods:With the wireless signal being sent from the analgesia terminal transmitter to the base station of analgesia control, the analgesia pump can be connected with wireless analgesia terminal. Drugs can be delivered persistently or intermittently to keep the plasma concentration in an appropriate level according the vested parameters from the wireless system of analgesic delivering. Results:The information from the patients in the process of analgesia can be processed and saved by the system. According to the information of running and alarm displaying at the monitoring station, the analgesia records can be kept automatically. Conclusion:The satisfaction degrees on analgesia treatment can be improved, and the burden of work for anesthesiologists can be lessened as well, which improve the quality of medical services and promote the development of informatization in anesthesiology department.