Effectiveness of Adjunctive Analgesics in Head and Neck Cancer Patients Receiving Curative (Chemo-) Radiotherapy: A Systematic Review (original) (raw)

OBJECTIVE Our aim was to give an overview of the effectiveness of adjunctive analgesics in head and neck cancer (HNC) patients receiving (chemo-) radiotherapy. DESIGN Systematic review. INTERVENTIONS This systematic review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, and ClinicalTrials.gov were searched for studies concerning "head neck cancer," "adjunctive analgesics," "pain," and "radiotherapy." OUTCOME MEASURES Pain outcome, adverse events, and toxicity and other reported outcomes, for example, mucositis, quality of life, depression, etc. RESULTS Nine studies were included in our synthesis. Most studies were of low quality and had a high risk of bias on several domains of the Cochrane Collaboration tool. Only two studies comprised high-quality randomized controlled trials in which pregabalin and a doxepin rinse showed their ef...