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Completed Phase 3 Interventional Results available

Efficacy of Intranasal Fentanyl at Reducing Pain During Abscess Incision and Drainage (I&D) in Children

ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT01549002

Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT01549002. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.

ClinicalTrials.gov public records Last synced Sep 5, 2026, 3:17 AM EDT

Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.

Brief summary

Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.

Children can develop abscesses (a collection of pus under their skin) that require a physician to cut it open to let the pus drain out. This is a painful procedure. Most medical professionals will use numbing cream and inject numbing medicine into the skin, just like at the dentist, to help reduce the pain. While this helps minimize the pain of cutting the skin, it doesn't help the pain associated with draining out the pus. There are many strategies and medications available to physicians to help decrease the pain of this procedure. Most of the medications available to treat the pain require the placement of an intravenous (IV) catheter through the patient's skin, which itself is a painful procedure. In the investigators emergency department, many patients with abscesses that need a procedure to drain the pus receive a medicine called morphine through an IV. Some pain medicines, however, can be sprayed into a patient's nose, and have been shown to be helpful at reducing the pain of a broken bone or a burn. These medicines do not require the placement of an IV. The purpose of this research study is to determine whether a medicine called fentanyl, when sprayed into the nose of patients aged 4 to 18 years undergoing abscess drainage, is not worse than IV morphine in decreasing the pain of the procedure. After the risks and benefits of the study are explained to patients and their parents, written informed consent will be obtained. Written informed assent will be obtained for patients older than 8 years of age. Like the flipping of a coin, a computer program will decide randomly which half of the patients will receive fentanyl nose spray and which half will receive morphine by IV. The patients assigned to receive fentanyl nose spray will not have an IV placed. The patients assigned to receive morphine will have an IV placed. Both groups of patients will have the abscess drainage procedure done the same way. All patients will be videotaped in order to score their pain by a trained observer. This score is the main outcome (measurement) in the study.

Study identification

NCT ID
NCT01549002
Recruitment status
Completed
Study type
Interventional
Phase
Phase 3
Lead sponsor
Columbia University
Other
Enrollment
20 participants

Conditions and interventions

Eligibility (public fields only)

Age range
4 Years to 18 Years
Sex
All
Healthy volunteers
Healthy volunteers not accepted

This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.

Study timeline

Start date
Dec 31, 2011
Primary completion
Mar 31, 2013
Completion
Mar 31, 2013
Last update posted
Apr 29, 2019

2012 – 2013

United States locations

U.S. sites
1
U.S. states
1
U.S. cities
1
Facility City State ZIP Site status
Alexandra & Steven Cohen Children's Emergency Department of Columbia University Medical Center New York New York 10032

Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.

About this trial record page

What this page shows
Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT01549002, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
What this page does not do
No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
Where the data comes from
Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
Last refresh
Last update posted Apr 29, 2019 · Synced Sep 5, 2026

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Open the official record

The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT01549002 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.

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