Research overview: buprenorphine for feline pain management

Buprenorphine, a partial opioid agonist, became a widely used analgesic in cats, valued for its efficacy, duration, and the practical feature that it can be absorbed through the oral mucosa, allowing convenient transmucosal administration. Research characterized its pharmacology and effective routes in cats, supporting its role in acute and perioperative pain management. This overview compiles the analgesia literature rather than one source, describing how buprenorphine provides opioid analgesia with a favorable profile in cats, why transmucosal absorption offers a practical dosing route, and how it fits into multimodal pain protocols. It matters because effective, practical opioid analgesia is important for managing surgical and acute pain in cats, and buprenorphine's properties made it a mainstay of feline pain control, contributing to improved analgesia in a species historically undertreated for pain.