Conditions: Cancer Pain
Keywords: Pain Cancer patients Caffeine Adjuvant analgesics Sedation Confusion Quality of life Fatigue
Allocation: RANDOMIZED | Intervention model: PARALLEL
Enrollment: 41
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
Pain is a most common symptom and it has a high impact on quality of life in cancer patients. Many cancer patients have received opioid therapy, but also many of them have suffered from side effects of opioids. Drowsiness and confusion are common side effects of opioids. Caffeine is a well known psychostimulant,and it is widely used as an analgesics. Thus, the investigators aimed to prove the efficacy of intravenous caffeine administration as an adjuvant analgesics to opioids. At the same time, the investigators tried to find that the side effects of opioids could be ameliorated by caffeine.

Detailed description:
Previous studies on cancer pain lacked assessment of quality of life. And most of previous studies on cancer pain did not give attention to symptoms accompanied with pain. We include such variables as outcome measures, and aimed to evaluate the efficacy and the safety of intravenous caffeine in advanced cancer inpatients.

Arms:
arm 1: Intravenous injections of 200mg of caffeine with 100ml of normal saline over 1 hour arm 2: Intravenous injections of 100ml of normal saline over 1 hour

Interventions: intervention 1: Caffeine intervention 2: Normal saline
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: Intravenous injection of caffeine 200mg with 100ml of normal saline over 1 hour, once a day, for two days. intervention 2: Intravenous injections of 100ml of normal saline over 1 hour, once a day, for two days

Protocol document: