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Drug Combinations in the Treatment of Neuropathic Pain

  • Neuropathic Pain (E Eisenberg, Section Editor)
  • Published:
Current Pain and Headache Reports Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Pharmacotherapy, the main treatment option for neuropathic pain, remains a major clinical challenge. The most commonly studied drug classes in the context of neuropathic pain—antidepressants, anticonvulsants, and opioids—have only limited efficacy and frequent dose-limiting adverse effects. Yet, most guidelines recommend monotherapy as the first line of neuropathic pain treatment. Recent understanding of neuropathic pain pathophysiology suggests that multiple mechanisms, both at the peripheral and the central nervous system levels, underlie neuropathic pain, pointing to the possibility that targeting multiple mechanisms simultaneously can improve treatment outcome. A few clinical trials using various drug combinations for neuropathic pain have already been published but yielded inconsistent results, partially due to methodological problems associated with the conduction of such trials. Nonetheless, combination therapy remains an intriguing treatment option for neuropathic pain, awaiting future high-quality validating trials.

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Compliance with Ethics Guidelines

Conflict of Interest

Dr. Elon Eisenberg is a section editor for Current Pain and Headache Reports.

Dr. Erica Suzan declares no potential conflicts of interest.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pain Research Unit, Institute of Pain Medicine, Rambam Health Care Campus, and the Faculty of Medicine, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 9602, Haifa, 3109601, Israel

    Elon Eisenberg & Erica Suzan

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  1. Elon Eisenberg
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  2. Erica Suzan
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Correspondence to Elon Eisenberg.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Neuropathic Pain

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Eisenberg, E., Suzan, E. Drug Combinations in the Treatment of Neuropathic Pain. Curr Pain Headache Rep 18, 463 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11916-014-0463-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11916-014-0463-y

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