Caffeine: What Is Its Role in Pain Medicine?

Abstract

Caffeine is the world's most widely used psychoactive legal substance. The involvement of caffeine in pain management has gotten minimal attention in the past, but it is getting more attention now. This article provides a brief assessment of the literature to clarify the role of caffeine as a pain reliever and stimulate the interest of researchers. Caffeine affects adenosine receptors, which are involved in nociception, and plays a significant role in pain regulation. Caffeine's usage as an adjuvant therapy has been extensively documented in the literature, and it is now accessible in certain over-the-counter drugs. The mixture of coffee and morphine for pain reduction in individuals with terminal cancer has shown mixed outcomes in studies. Caffeine can be utilized for hypnic headaches and post-dural puncture headaches since it is crucial in pain regulation. Caffeine has the potential to help in pain management. Caffeine's usage for migraines and end-stage cancer disease is not well acknowledged. Further research is essential to focus on caffeine's potential role in various forms of pain, including dosage escalation and outcome assessment standardization.

Valorization of spent coffee ground and coffee silverskin as a source of nutrients and bioactive compounds

“…Caffeine, 3,7‐dihydro‐1,3,7‐trimethyl‐1H‐purine‐2,6‐dione, belongs to methylxanthine‐class and it is synthesized from xanthosine. It is one of the few alkaloids legal throughout the world despite it is a psychoactive and central nervous system stimulant in fact it is a widely used as psychotropic drug and seems to have a positive effect on long‐term memory reducing the risk of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease (Boppana et al., 2022). Another important molecule belonging to the alkaloids family is trigonelline (Saud & Salamatullah, 2021), which will be discussed in detail in Section 4.1.2.…”