Morphine and other pain relief drugs used in cancer surgery may spur return of malignancy

by ADAM MARCUS

Morphine is often a cancer patient’s best and final friend. So it came as a shock when researchers at the University of Minnesota published a study showing that doses of morphine similar to those used to ease pain actually spurred the growth of human breast cancer cells grafted into mice. “These results indicate that clinical use of morphine could potentially be harmful” in some cancer patients, the scientists wrote in 2002 in Cancer Research.

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