Recommendations for the perioperative use of buprenorphine during interventional pain procedures, including best practices for perioperative tapering of the drug, were recently published in Pain Physician.
The researchers based their buprenorphine recommendations on an analysis of 12 studies in the literature researching buprenorphine.
The recommendations include suggestions for tapering or continuing use of the drug in the perioperative setting based on type of surgery and patient characteristics. Among those are a suggestion on withholding buprenorphine preoperatively, or continuing buprenorphine perioperatively for procedures with low risk for postoperative pain, such as colonoscopy.