Trial results showed that patients given Dsuvia before a cosmetic procedure were less reliant on IV-administered opioids for recovery.
AcelRx Pharmaceuticals announced a summary of results from a podium presentation on Dsuvia (sufentanil sublingual tablet) presented at the annual meeting of The Aesthetic Society.
The podium presentation, Patient Experience and Opioid Minimalization in Outpatient Plastic Surgery Procedures Using a Sufentanil Sublingual Tablet, was presented by Hisham Seify, MD, PhD, FACS, a board-certified plastic surgeon, past-president of the Orange County Society of Plastic Surgeons, and Associate Clinical Professor at the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine.
Some of the data presented at the meeting were from an investigator-initiated trial supported by AcelRx.
The data was collected from 124 patients during both waking cosmetic procedures and under general anesthesia.
All 92 SST-treated patients received a single SST administered either 30 minutes before shorter-duration procedures or 45 minutes before extubation for longer-duration procedures.
The 32 control patients all received general anesthesia with standard intravenous opioids.
The control group required significantly more IV morphine milligram equivalents (MME) during recovery than SST-treated patients for patients undergoing general anesthesia.
The average dose of opioids administered in the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) to control patients was more than five-fold higher than SST-treated patients, with controls receiving 3.60 ± 2.65 MME as contrasted with SST-treated patients that were administered an average of 0.64 ± 2.31 MME (p <.001).
In surgery without general anesthesia, no SST-treated patients required opioids or other analgesics in the PACU for pain. The mean recovery time was under an hour for the general anesthesia SST-treated patients and only 15 minutes for the awake cosmetic SST-treated patients.
Adverse events requiring medical intervention following general anesthesia were minimal in SST-treated patients, with 1.6% requiring additional antiemetics in the PACU compared to 9.4% of control patients. In awake cosmetic patients, 3.2% of SST-treated patients required an antiemetic in the PACU to treat nausea.
“My extensive experience with operating on patients treated with Dsuvia has reinforced my earlier observations that Dsuvia is a unique sublingual alternative to IV opioids that can clearly enhance the standard of care in perioperative analgesia,” said Seify. “Administering a sublingual opioid to surgical patients that is well-tolerated, avoids the traditional peaks and troughs of IV administration, and substantially reduces the use of postoperative opioids, thereby facilitating a timely discharge, represents an exciting progression in the management of perioperative pain in the surgical setting.”
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