What Are the Symptoms Of Hyperalgesia?
The most common symptom of opioid induced hyperalgesia is a heightened sensitivity to the pain you experience with no injuries or the worsening of another ailment. For example, the surgical incision becomes more agonizing over time despite the fact that the incision is not inflamed and the patient has not sustained any new injury.
There are three major signs of Opioid-Induced Hyperalgesia:
- You experience an increasing discomfort in response to the external stimuli
- A rise in the severity of pain you are experiencing over time
- The pain spreads to a different part of the body from where it started
Hyperalgesia vs Tolerance to Opioids
Even though the 2 processes are similar, hyperalgesia differs from developing a tolerance.
When a person experiences tolerance to medication, it usually implies that the body has grown acclimated to the medication’s availability at the present dosage, as well as the medicine isn’t any longer effective. Whenever a person develops a tolerance to medicine, raising the dose usually alleviates their discomfort.
Drug tolerance differs from hyperalgesia. Here taking more pain medicine does not diminish the level of pain an individual experiences. Taking pain meds can sometimes exacerbate an individual’s pain.
A person with hyperalgesia when exposed to pain, for example, after surgery, their reaction towards that pain is much higher than predicted.
Hyperalgesia and Opioid Withdrawal Symptoms
Even though the clinical efficacy of opioids for managing pain is impaired by side effects, stopping opioids can produce very painful withdrawal episodes in persistent users.
Therefore, in this regard, opioid withdrawal presents a substantial difficulty in patients whose pain has subsided and thus no longer requires opioid treatment, especially in those people who are on excessively high dosages and a dosage decrease is necessary.
Symptoms of withdrawal such as abdominal pain, anxiety, sleeplessness, muscle pain, and hyperhidrosis usually appear between 8 – 48 hours following the last dose of opioids, based on the half-life of the drug.
To prevent these unpleasant physical, emotional, and autonomic symptoms, people feel obliged to keep using opioids. As a result, withdrawal is a major driver of prolonged opioid usage and a contributor to relapse.
The relapse or exacerbation of an existing pain issue is a possible side effect of stopping the opioid medication. Even though discomfort is a major concern, individuals on opioid medication report that withdrawal reduction is a much more essential factor in continuing to take opioids than managing the pain.
It’s tough to tell the difference between agony from an existing disease and discomfort from opiate withdrawal. Individuals may want increased opioid dosages to cope with an apparent increase in pain, although the underlying cause could be withdrawals instead of the aggravation of your existing pain problem.
Withdrawal is one of the primary reasons for continuing opiate use in non-prescription opioid consumers, and most of these people, like prescription opioid consumers, would be best positioned to quit if there were more successful treatment alternatives for reducing withdrawals.
How Is Opioid-Induced Hyperalgesia Treated?
Physicians may advise a patient suffering opioid-induced hyperalgesia to progressively decrease their opioid dosage, with the goal of eventually tapering off the medicine completely.
If the opioids aren’t working, and the pain is getting worse, or it’s becoming more generalized, you might want to look further into it. Here are some alternative treatment options.