Knowledge Gap Leaves Physicians at a Disadvantage on Pediatric Opioid Painkillers

A joint meeting of three FDA advisory committees tackled the issue of prescribing opioid painkillers in pediatrics, and came up with a constant refrain: We need more data.

Over two days, the committees discussed how physicians don’t have a confirmed opioid dosing regimen for children – much of the clinical information is extrapolated from studies in adult populations – and how performing clinical trials in pediatric pain management can be notoriously difficult.

The main barriers to research include the large number of pediatric patients needed to generate useful data, which are broken up among separate age brackets and the underlying causes of pain. Ethical considerations include how subjects should only be in one trial at a time, such as when patients are already being treated for indications under other institutional review boards.