Average Chronic Pain Medication Needed in Adult Patient with Sickle Cell Disease and Its Relation to Vitamin D Level

Introduction: The chronic pain in sickle cell disease (SCD) arises from chronic bone damage as a consequence of bone marrow infraction during vaso-occulsive events. There are certain barriers to adequate pain management in adult patients with SCD, namely, limited knowledge among the clinicians, inadequate assessment, concerns about addiction, and biases against opioid use. We did retrospective analysis to investigate the average pain medication needed by adult patient with SCD. We also did analysis to see if there was a relation between plasma vitamin D level and amount of pain medication needed.

Methods:

We take care of approximately 300 active adult SCD at Hematology clinic at our institute. We did a retrospective analysis of 458 adult patients with SCD seen at our clinic between 2001 and 2016. We collected data on type of SCD, plasma 25 -hydroxyvitamin d level and amount of opioid pain medication in mg. To get uniform units of opiates, we converted all the different opiates into morphine.

Results:

The average morphine dose in a 24 hours period needed to manage chronic pain in an adult patient with SS type was 84 mg with standard deviation of 72, for SC type was 60 mg with standard deviation of 72 and for sickle beta thal type was 72 mg with standard deviation of 71. There were 4 patients with SS with hereditary persistence of hemoglobin F and average opiate dose in them was 84 mg.

We obtained vitamin d level on 223 patients and out of them, 47 had vitamin d level of <4.2 ng/ml (lowest level reportable by our lab). We also found negative correlation between amount of pain medication and vitamin D level. The spearman correlation coefficient was -0.2 and p value was <0.01.

Conclusion:

Because we were unable to find any previous reports of the correlation of vitamin D levels and opiate use in an adult population with SCD, we believe that this is the first study to report this correlation. It also provides a rough estimate regarding average amount of opiates that an adult patient with SCD needs. This correlation between Vitamin D levels and opiate requirement supports our current practice of screening all patients for Vitamin D deficiency using 25hydroxy vitamin D levels and treating all patients who are found to be deficient. We do not know if this Vitamin D replacement will reduce pain, bone health or the amount of opiate medication needed in the future.