Fiore M, Alfieri A, Di Franco S, Petrou S, Damiani G, Pace MC. Medicinal cannabis products for the treatment of acute pain. World J Clin Cases 2023; 11(12): 2670-2676 [PMID: 37214578 DOI: 10.12998/wjcc.v11.i12.2670]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Marco Fiore, MD, Doctor, Department of Women, Child and General and Specialized Surgery, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Piazza Miraglia 2, Naples 80138, Italy. marco.fiore@unicampania.it
Research Domain of This Article
Anesthesiology
Article-Type of This Article
Minireviews
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (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: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Clin Cases. Apr 26, 2023; 11(12): 2670-2676 Published online Apr 26, 2023. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v11.i12.2670
Medicinal cannabis products for the treatment of acute pain
Marco Fiore, Aniello Alfieri, Sveva Di Franco, Stephen Petrou, Giovanni Damiani, Maria Caterina Pace
Marco Fiore, Aniello Alfieri, Sveva Di Franco, Maria Caterina Pace, Department of Women, Child and General and Specialized Surgery, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Naples 80138, Italy
Stephen Petrou, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, United States
Giovanni Damiani, Department of Biomedical, Surgical, and Dental Sciences, University of Milan, Milan 20122, Italy
Author contributions: This review was mainly written by Fiore M, Alfieri A and Di Franco S; Alfieri A and Di Franco S collected the data; Pace MC supervised the writing of the paper; Petrou S and Damiani G critically revised the paper; Petrou S provided to revise the English language of the manuscript; and all authors approved the final version to be published.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors declare no conflicts of interest related to this article.
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, 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: January 29, 2023 Peer-review started: January 29, 2023 First decision: February 17, 2023 Revised: March 10, 2023 Accepted: March 27, 2023 Article in press: March 27, 2023 Published online: April 26, 2023
Abstract
For thousands of years, medicinal cannabis has been used for pain treatment, but its use for pain management is still controversial. Meta-analysis of the literature has shown contrasting results on the addition of cannabinoids to opioids compared with placebo/other active agents to reduce pain. Clinical studies are mainly focused on medicinal cannabis use in chronic pain management, for which the analgesic effect has been proven in many studies. This review focuses on the potential use of medical cannabis for acute pain management in preclinical studies, studies on healthy subjects and the few pioneering studies in the clinical setting.
Core Tip: Medicinal cannabis use for pain management is still controversial. Meta-analysis of the literature has shown contrasting results on the addition of cannabinoids to opioids to in reducing pain. Clinical studies are mainly focused on medicinal cannabis use in chronic pain management, for which the analgesic effect has been proven in many studies. This present review focuses on the potential application of medical cannabis for acute pain, exploring the physiopathology of the endocannabinoid system, preclinical studies, studies on healthy subjects and the few pioneering studies in the clinical setting.
