Translational advances in pain and anesthesia for cancer patients

Effective cancer pain management requires multidisciplinary approaches for multimodal analgesia. Although opioids have been the cornerstone, developments such as regional anesthesia and interventional pain techniques, complementary and alternative medicine, and new pharmaceuticals also have shown promise to relieve cancer pain. This overview of relevant clinical efforts and the modern day state of the science will afford a better understanding of pain mechanisms and multimodal approaches beneficial in optimizing analgesia for cancer patients. J. Surg. Oncol. 2012; 105:488–493. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.