(WBBM NEWSRADIO) - The federal government has approved a new non-opioid pain medication, the first of its kind in pain management.
The new FDA-approved pain drug is suzetrigine, with the brand name Journavx.
“The potential with this are huge”, according to Dr. Jason Ross, pain medicine specialist and anesthesiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
Suzetrigine is designed to alleviate moderate to severe pain and, it’s hoped, can be an option that will lead to fewer people being addicted to opioids.
Dr. Ross says the medication was developed based on people with congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) syndrome, a rare condition whose sufferers don’t feel pain.
“They found these patients, and they identified what mutation in their nervous system that creates this, and they found it was a sodium channel. So, this medication was created to block that pain transmission pathway,” Ross tells WBBM.
Dr. Ross wonders how quickly the medical community will begin using it and whether insurance companies will approve it, as it’s more expensive than current opioid painkillers.
Based on test studies of the drug, Dr. Ross says opioid drugs are still the most effective at treating severe pain.
“They looked at two different types of surgery, bunionectomies and abdominoplasties or tummy tucks, and they compared the use of this medication versus a placebo and versus opioid pain medication,” says Ross. “They showed that there was an improvement in pain compared to the placebo, but it was not as effective as the opioid.”
The drug’s approval does not extend to chronic pain management.
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