A Recent Update on Drug Delivery Systems for Pain Management

Abstract

Pain remains a global health challenge affecting approximately 1.5 billion people worldwide. Pain has been an implicit variable in the equation of human life for many centuries considering different types and the magnitude of pain. Therefore, developing an efficacious drug delivery system for pain management remains an open challenge for researchers in the field of medicine. Lack of therapeutic efficacy still persists, despite high throughput studies in the field of pain management. Research scientists have been exploiting different alternatives to curb the adverse side effects of pain medications or attempting a more substantial approach to minimize the prevalence of pain. Various drug delivery systems have been developed such as nanoparticles, microparticles to curb adverse side effects of pain medications or minimize the prevalence of pain. This literature review firstly provides a brief introduction of pain as a sensation and its pharmacological interventions. Second, it highlights the most recent studies in the pharmaceutical field for pain management and serves as a strong base for future developments. Herein, we have classified drug delivery systems based on their sizes such as nano, micro, and macro systems, and for each of the reviewed systems, design, formulation strategies, and drug release performance has been discussed.

Keywords:

• Pain
• drug delivery
• nanosystems
• microsystems
• films

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Mr. Durgesh Jha, Miss. Devanshi Shah, Mrs. Sharada D’souza for their relentless support. The authors would also like to thank Miss Shravani Phadke for her help in formatting the figures.

Declaration of interest

The author reports no conflict of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Funding

This work did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors

Author contribution

Apoorva Phadke has performed the literature search, data analysis, drafting and revision. Purnima Amin proposed and conceptualized the idea, reviewed and supervised the article.