Journavx (Suzetrigine): A Safer Alternative for Pain Relief?
Abstract
Madam,
Opioids are widely used to manage moderate to severe acute pain especially post-surgical acute pain; however, these analgesics have several limitations, including the development of tolerance, addiction, physical dependence, constipation, respiratory depression, and various behavioural side effects that frequently lead to patients’ non-compliance. Older adults, due to age-related physiological changes and reduced metabolic capacity, experience higher rates of chronic pain from both cancerous and non-cancerous conditions and are more susceptible to adverse opioid reactions1. The widespread use of opioids has contributed to a growing public health crisis, with opioid overdose deaths in the United States rising almost every year since the late 1990s. This increase has been particularly dramatic since 2019, with opioid-related deaths surging by 64% between 2019 and 2022, reaching 81,806 deaths (25.0 per 100,000) in 2022. Overall, opioid-related mortality has increased tenfold, highlighting the urgent need for alternative pain management strategies2.
The U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time approved the first of its kind non-opioid analgesic, Journavx (Suzetrigine), for moderate to severe acute pain in adults. Journavx is a potent allosteric inhibitor of voltage-gated sodium channels 1.8 (Nav1.8) that are expressed by peripheral neurons and not by the neurons of the central nervous system. Therefore, it does not cause dependence and tolerance like…
How strong is the evidence?
Evidence Hub reads this as a randomized trial, done in people. Its evidence level is 2 of 5 (High · randomized trial). Randomized trials of a reasonable size are the strongest single-study design.
Read the paper
Related studies
- Noninvasive and Point-of-Care Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS)-Based Breathalyzer for Mass Screening of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) under 5 min
- De Novo Transcriptome Analysis and Detection of Antimicrobial Peptides of the American Cockroach Periplaneta americana (Linnaeus)
- Molecular Characterization and Expression Profiling of Tomato GRF Transcription Factor Family Genes in Response to Abiotic Stresses and Phytohormones
- Assembly of Tight Junction Strands: Claudin-10b and Claudin-3 Form Homo Tetrameric Building Blocks that Polymerise in a Channel-Independent Manner
- Update of the Pompe variant database for the prediction of clinical phenotypes: Novel disease‐associated variants, common sequence variants, and results from newborn screening
- Machine Learning-Based SERS Chemical Space for Two-Way Prediction of Structures and Spectra of Untrained Molecules
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.