A glimmer of hope in the opioid epidemic among patients with musculoskeletal pain
The national opioid epidemic has grown at such breakneck speed that public health experts have been left scrambling to keep up. Though they understand the reasons behind the abuse — the solutions are complicated and costly.
Yet there appears to be some success at reducing at least one area of opioid abuse.
In new research by Health Research and Policy’s Eric Sun, the risk for chronic opioid use among patients with musculoskeletal pain actually decreased slightly between 2008 and 2014.
The Stanford Medicine assistant professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine found that measures such as avoiding opioid use soon after diagnosis can further reduce the risk of addiction, especially among patients at highest risk for chronic opioid use.
"We found that early opioid use after diagnosis is predictive of opioid use longer term, suggesting that it may be prudent to minimize opioid use where possible for patients with musculoskeletal pain,” said Sun, whose research was published earlier this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
His co-authors are Jasmin Moshfegh, who is working on her PhD in health policy, and Steven Z. George, director of musculoskeletal research at Duke University School of Medicine.
Patients with lower back or chronic neck, shoulder and knee pain are at the highest risk for opioid abuse since pain meds are typically prescribed to help ease their spasms.
Patients who suffer musculoskeletal pain may unwittingly transition to chronic opioid use, which means filling 10 or more prescriptions or having a supply for at least 120 days. The prescription drugs include hydrocodone, hydromorphone, methadone, morphine, oxymorphone, and/or oxycodone. Those don’t include heroin and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
Sun and his fellow researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine used a large health-care database to assess the risk and risk factors for chronic opioid use among more than 400,000 “opioid-naïve” patients — those who have never been prescribed painkillers before — recently diagnosed with pain in the knee, neck, lower back or shoulder.
The sample was restricted to privately insured patients, thereby excluding other policy-relevant populations, such as those who were prescribed pain medications under Medicare or Medicaid.
They found that risk for chronic opioid use ranged from 0.3 percent for knee pain to 1.5 percent for multiple-site pan and decreased for some anatomical regions during the timeframe studied. They discovered a relative decline of 25 to 50 percent across all pain types from 2008 to 2014.
Opioid Abuse
Opioid abuse has its roots in the late 1990s when pharmaceutical companies assured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to pain relievers. Clinicians began prescribing them at greater rates because they worked so well and seemed safe.
Today, more than 130 people die every day from opioid-related drug overdoses from prescription pain relievers, heroin and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, From 2002 to 2017, there was more than a fourfold increase in opioid deaths, with some 49,000 people dying in 2017.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total economic burden of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of health care, lost productivity, addiction treatment and criminal justice involvement.
“While our research found that only about 1 percent of patients with musculoskeletal pain progress to chronic opioid use, this is potentially concerning because it’s an extremely common diagnosis,” Sun said. “By pointing out the scope of the issue and identifying factors that place patients at risk, we hope this research will guide further efforts aimed at reducing opioid use among patients with musculoskeletal pain.”