In the United States alone, each year approximately 5 million children undergo painful surgery, many of them experience serious side-effects with opioids and inadequate pain relief. Safe and effective analgesia is an important unmet critical medical need in children and its continued existence is an important perioperative safety and economic problem. Inadequate pain relief and serious side effects from perioperative opioids occur frequently in up to 50% of children. Morphine, the most commonly used perioperative opioid, has a narrow therapeutic index and large inter-patient variations in analgesic response and serious side effects. Frequent inter-individual variations in responses to morphine have significant clinical and economic impact with inadequate pain relief at one end of the spectrum of responses and serious adverse effects such as respiratory depression at the other end. Much of the inter-individual variability in response to a dose of morphine following surgical procedures can be explained by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a subset of the genes that encode proteins involved in pain mechanisms and opioid pathway.
See this in plain English?
AI-rewrites the medical criteria so a patient or caregiver can understand them. Always confirm with the trial site.
Look at polymorphisms in genes that regulate pain perception, opioid transport and opioid receptor signaling to see if there is a higher susceptibility to pain and morphine requirement.
Timeframe: After tonsillectomy surgery (duration of post anesthesia care unit stay)