Gretchen White
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Most people with metastatic cancer, meaning cancer that has spread through the body, experience pain. Opioid painkillers are central to their care.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
opioids
opioid therapy
cancer pain
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether opioid therapy is associated with lower pain severity and pain interference in a prospective cohort of patients newly diagnosed with metastatic cancer.
- Identify whether co-prescribed medications such as benzodiazepines increase opioid side effects like somnolence, using linear mixed-effects models in the metastatic cancer cohort.
- Test whether younger age, history of substance use disorder and mood disorders predict opioid misuse and use disorder, using time-to-event analyses.
- Understand how patients, family caregivers and clinicians view opioid-related decision-making for pain in metastatic cancer.
More about the research
Doctors have long assumed that for these patients, the benefits of opioids nearly always outweigh the harms. But research on opioid benefits and harms has mostly studied people with pain not caused by cancer and has excluded cancer patients. Meanwhile, people with metastatic cancer may live for years. The few studies in cancer suggest serious harms do occur, but they have major weaknesses. This leaves patients, families and clinicians without solid evidence for opioid decisions.
Why it matters
Clear evidence on when opioids help and who faces higher risk of side effects or misuse could guide pain care for people with metastatic cancer. Patients, family caregivers and clinicians could weigh pain relief against risks more accurately. The findings are intended to lay the groundwork for a decision-support intervention that could improve opioid prescribing and pain management for this group.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Virginia LeBaron
University of Virginia, VA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop digital phenotypes, distinctive data patterns of the advanced cancer pain experience at home, using smartwatch and environmental sensor data from the BESI-C system. The phenotypes will cover how often pain events occur, how intense they are, and how they affect quality of life.
Zachary Mannes
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Test whether cannabis use disorder is a risk factor for later opioid use disorder, opioid-related hospitalization, and fatal or non-fatal overdose. Use a longitudinal cohort built from VHA electronic health records.
Jacqueline Kruser
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Map how time-limited trials of mechanical ventilation are actually carried out in five ICUs, using focused ethnography of 50 trials in patients with acute respiratory failure.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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