Dear all

I have had a query from a consultant anaesthetist asking if there is anyone offering serum morphine and morphine glucuronide metabolite assays. He works in our pain management unit and has a number of patients on fairly high doses of morphine.

His main concern is that the patients are taking their full dose and that no "transference" of drugs is going on.

A few years ago there was an assay for blood methadone for similar reasons but the results were difficult to interpret because we needed to know dose, time elapsed from last dose to sampling, body weight etc. This was only ever an estimate that the concentration found could be arrived at by the dose taken and that methadone was not being "transferred" to another individual.

I think similar problems would arise with a blood estimate of morphine but I may be wrong. Anyway, has anyone come across this problem?

Kind regards

Ian