be women, use long-acting opioids, diagnosed with acute pain before using opioids, and be publicly or self-insured.
“This study seems to have been rather well received in the public health and policy arena. Several states have enacted legislation to limit the supply of opioids and now other states are considering this, in part, based on these findings,” Martin said. “On the other hand, some palliative care clinicians are less receptive of these findings as they realize these findings may place further restrictions on the care they want to provide their patients.”
The authors of the study believe that awareness about the risks of continual opioid use could help healthcare providers tailor a patient’s initial opioid prescription and minimize the harms of long-term opioid consumption.
“Until this work was published, I do not think clinicians appreciated how rapidly the probability of continued opioid use increases in the first two weeks of opioid therapy,” he said. “I don’t think that physicians really thought that when they prescribed a 10-day supply of opioids instead of a 5-day supply that they just doubled the chances from 10 percent to 20 percent that their patients would be on opioids one year later. I think these findings reinforce the recommendations of the CDC guidelines on prescribing opioids for chronic pain that recommend using three days or less of opioids and rarely more than seven days to treat chronic pain.”
