Common Analgesic Agents and Their Roles in Analgesic Nephropathy: A Commentary on the Evidence

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Author(s)
Yaxley, Julian
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2016
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An association between non-opioid analgesic agents and chronic kidney disease has long been suspected. The presumed development of chronic renal impairment following protracted and excessive use of non-opioid analgesia is known as analgesic nephropathy. Many clinicians accept analgesic nephropathy as a real entity despite the paucity of scientific evidence. This narrative review aims to summarize the literature in the field. The weight of available observational literature suggests that long-term ingestion of paracetamol and combination mixtures of aspirin and paracetamol are likely to contribute to chronic renal impairment. ...
View more >An association between non-opioid analgesic agents and chronic kidney disease has long been suspected. The presumed development of chronic renal impairment following protracted and excessive use of non-opioid analgesia is known as analgesic nephropathy. Many clinicians accept analgesic nephropathy as a real entity despite the paucity of scientific evidence. This narrative review aims to summarize the literature in the field. The weight of available observational literature suggests that long-term ingestion of paracetamol and combination mixtures of aspirin and paracetamol are likely to contribute to chronic renal impairment. However, there is no convincing data to implicate non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or aspirin monotherapy in the development of analgesic nephropathy. In the absence of high-level evidence, while controversy persists, it may be prudent for physicians to consider all non-narcotic analgesics to be nephrotoxic with long-term use.
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View more >An association between non-opioid analgesic agents and chronic kidney disease has long been suspected. The presumed development of chronic renal impairment following protracted and excessive use of non-opioid analgesia is known as analgesic nephropathy. Many clinicians accept analgesic nephropathy as a real entity despite the paucity of scientific evidence. This narrative review aims to summarize the literature in the field. The weight of available observational literature suggests that long-term ingestion of paracetamol and combination mixtures of aspirin and paracetamol are likely to contribute to chronic renal impairment. However, there is no convincing data to implicate non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or aspirin monotherapy in the development of analgesic nephropathy. In the absence of high-level evidence, while controversy persists, it may be prudent for physicians to consider all non-narcotic analgesics to be nephrotoxic with long-term use.
View less >
Journal Title
Korean Journal of Family Medicine
Volume
37
Issue
6
Copyright Statement
© 2016 The Korean Academy of Family Medicine. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.
Subject
Health services and systems
Public health
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Primary Health Care
General & Internal Medicine
Nephropathy