Intravenous Ketorolac Vs. Morphine In Children With Acute Abdominal Pain
Status:
Recruiting
Trial end date:
2029-12-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
Appendicitis is a common condition in children 6-17 years of age, and the top reason for
emergency surgery in Canada. Children with appendicitis can have very bad pain in their
belly. Children often need pain medications given to them through a needle in their arm
called an intravenous (IV). The most common IV pain medication is a type of opioid called
morphine. We know that opioids work well to improve pain, but there are risks and side
effects when taking them. There are non-opioid medications that doctors can give to patients,
like ketorolac. Ketorolac helps decrease inflammation and pain and has fewer side effects
when a patient takes it for a short period of time. Our past and present overuse of opioids,
driven by an unproven assumption that opioids work best for pain, resulted in an Opioid
Crisis and doctors are now looking for alternatives. To do this, we need to prove that there
are other options to treat children's pain that are just as good as opioids, with less side
effects.
The goal of our study is to discover if school aged children who arrive at the emergency
department with belly pain, improve just as much with ketorolac as they do with morphine. To
answer this question, we will need a very large number of patients in a study that includes
several hospitals across Canada. With a flip of a coin, each participant will either get a
single dose of morphine or a single dose of ketorolac. To make sure that our pain assessment
is impartial, no one will know which medicine the child received except the pharmacist who
prepared the medicine.