Benefits of Morphine Gel for Pain Reduction in Patients With Cancer Wounds
106 patients around the world
Available in Brazil
Potential participants will be all patients with malignant wounds in the head and neck or
breast region who meet the inclusion and exclusion criteria, forming the study population.
After signing the free and informed consent form, the intervention group will receive topical
morphine based on hydrogel in the formulation of 10mg of morphine sulfate - intravenous
solution (1 ml) with 8g of hydrogel and the control group will receive lidocaine in gel.
To ensure the quality and accuracy of the data, in addition to the safety of the research
participants, face-to-face monitoring visits will be carried out by the team from the
Representative Area of Clinical Research (ARPC)/INCA throughout the execution of this
protocol.
After signing the TCLE by the patient and researcher, the completion of the clinical form
will begin. The pharmacist of the research team responsible for the randomization will be
contacted to inform the inclusion of the patient in the study. The research team doctor will
be responsible for prescribing the medication to be used, be it morphine or lidocaine gel,
with a view to release by the hospital pharmacy.
Both morphine gel and lidocaine gel will be prepared in a flow hood suitable for handling the
medications.
Adverse events will be reported, using medical terminology, in the source document and in the
eCRF (electronic case report form). Upon identification of a reaction, the participant will
be evaluated by the research team physician. All measures required for the treatment of the
adverse event will be recorded in the source document.
Randomization and allocation will be performed using Research Electronic Data Capture
(REDCap) software in a form that will only be viewed by non-blind members of the pharmacy
team, responsible for handling the products and sending them to the team nurse who will be
responsible for wound dressing evil.
The data collection forms (eCRF) will be customized in the REDCap software by the
representative research area (ARPC) data management team. The data will be entered into the
eCRFs according to the standard operating procedures of the Division of Clinical
Research-INCA. The data will be exported to the R software by API (Application Programming
Interface) where the statistical analyzes will be performed.
The sample size of each group was determined using the G*Power application (version 3.1.9.4),
using the Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney nonparametric test approach. The calculation suggests a
minimum sample size of 53 patients per group.
In the first part of the analysis, a descriptive analysis of the sample profile and
comparison of the baseline variables of the control and intervention groups will be
performed. The second part will evaluate the effect of the treatments in the control and
intervention groups, analyzing the significance of the observed differences and the size of
the treatment effect.
For qualitative variables, the significance of the association between two variables, or the
difference between the distribution of the proportions of the two groups, will be
investigated using the chi-square test and, when it proves to be inconclusive, Fisher's exact
test will be used.
The odds ratio (OR) will be the measure used to express some risk of a qualitative outcome
when comparing the occurrence of the outcome in the groups.
For quantitative variables, the normality of distributions will be verified by the
Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests. If the variable of interest has a normal
distribution in both groups, the comparison will be made using the student's t-test; if at
least one of the groups does not present normal distribution, or if the variable to be
compared is an ordinal scale, such as the pain scale, the comparison of the two groups will
be performed using the Mann-Whitney test.
Two repeated measures in different evaluations will be compared by the paired Student's
t-test, if the two measures present normal distribution, or by the Wilcoxon signed rank test,
if at least one of the measures does not present normal distribution or if it is a scale
measure ordinal.
More than two repeated measures will be compared by ANOVA for repeated measures, in the case
of normality for all measures, or by the Friedman test, if at least one of the measures does
not present normal distribution, or if it is an ordinal scale measure.
Classifications or qualitative factors observed repeatedly at different times will be
compared by McNemmar test.
The effect of the received intervention on the pain score will be evaluated by the Glass
effect size measure.