The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released three new reports regarding the treatment of chronic pain.

• Opioid Treatments for Chronic Pain
  • This systematic review assesses the effectiveness and harms of opioid therapy for chronic noncancer pain, alternative opioid dosing strategies, and risk mitigation strategies.
• Nonopioid Pharmacologic Treatments for Chronic Pain
  • This systematic review evaluates the benefits and harms of nonopioid drugs in randomized controlled trials of patients with specific types of chronic pain, considering the effects on pain, function, quality of life, and adverse events.
• Noninvasive Nonpharmacological Treatment for Chronic Pain
  • This systematic review assesses noninvasive nonpharmacological treatments for common chronic pain conditions.

This update was released on April 16, 2020 by ARHQ's Effective Health Care (EHC) Program. Learn more.

The Effective Health Care (EHC) Program improves the quality of health care by providing the best available evidence on the outcomes, benefits and harms, and appropriateness of drugs, devices, and health care services and by helping health care professionals, patients, policymakers, and health care systems make informed health care decisions.  The EHC Program achieves this goal by partnering with research centers, academic institutions, health professional societies, consumer organizations, and other stakeholders to conduct research, evidence synthesis, evidence translation, dissemination, and implementation of research findings.