Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine
Open Access

Review Article

Pain Management for Urological Cancer Patients in Palliative Care

Hisaharu Oya^1*, Masahiko Koike¹, Naoki Iwata¹, Daisuke Kobayashi¹, Motohiro Matoba², Satoshi Murakami³, Takashi Kawahara², Tomohiko Hara², Takashi Maeda⁴, Mitsuro Kanda¹, Chie Tanaka¹, Suguru Yamada¹, Tsutomu Fujii¹, Goro Nakayama¹, Hiroyuki Sugimoto¹, Shuji Nomoto¹, Michitaka Fujiwara¹ and Yasuhiro Kodera¹

¹Department of Gastroenterological Surgery (Surgery II), Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, 65 Tsurumai-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi 466-8550, Japan

²Palliative Care Division, National Cancer Research Center Hospital, Tokyo, Japan

³Palliative Care Division, Seirei Sakra Citizen Hospital, Chiba, Japan

⁴Palliative Care Division, Tokyo Metropolitan Cancer and Infectious Diseases Center Komagome Hospital, Tokyo, Japan

*Corresponding Author:

Hisaharu Oya
Department of Gastroenterological Surgery (Surgery II)
Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine
65 Tsurumai-cho, Showaku, Nagoya, Aichi 466-8550, Japan
Tel: +81-52-744-2249
Fax: +81-52-744-2111
E-mail: u4946008@yahoo.co.jp

Received date: August 26, 2013; Accepted date: December 27, 2013; Published date: December 31, 2013

Citation: Oya H, Koike M, Iwata N, Kobayashi D, Matoba M et al. (2013) Pain Management for Urological Cancer Patients in Palliative Care. J Palliat Care Med 3:168. doi: 10.4172/2165-7386.1000168

Copyright: © 2013 Oya H, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Pain mitigation and therapy is one of the most important medical tasks of the urologist, where patients benefit a lot from the basic concepts of analgesia. However, pain resulting from cancer can be more complex than the one after the surgery. Patients that are not receiving regional analgesia should be administered with intravenous or oral non-opioid analgesics in combination with titration. Slow-release of oral opioids is increasingly being used as part of systemic pain management despite little evidence of their efficacy. Continuous epidural infusion is recommended for pain resulting from extensive retroperitoneal and transperitoneal cancers because of its ability to enhance recovery. Additional pain relief-related approaches such as radiation, psychosocial and spiritual needs of the patients have to be considered. Therefore, a multidisciplinary team of experts is needed to administer etiology-specific pain management and therapeutics. Patients often benefit from multimodal, interdisciplinary pain management techniques comprising psychological and educational approaches, including physiotherapy. This article reviews the pain management techniques for the patients under palliative care. In addition, it presents the cases of urological cancer patients that approach palliative care department of our institution for pain management.

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