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Overdose Risk in Chronic Pain Patients Linked to Higher Opioid Dose
The January 19 Annals of Internal Medicine features the first study to explore the risk of overdose in patients prescribed opioids for chronic noncancer pain in general health care. The study links risk of fatal and nonfatal opioid overdose to prescription use—strongly associating the risk with the prescribed dose.
A team led by Michael Von Korff, ScD, a senior investigator at Group Health Research Institute, studied nearly 10,000 patients who received multiple opioid prescriptions for common chronic pain conditions like back pain and osteoarthritis. Patients who received higher opioid doses were 9 times more likely to overdose than were those receiving low doses. Still, most of the overdoses occurred among patients receiving low to medium doses, because prescriptions at those levels were much more common.
More than 8 million U.S. adults—3 percent of all of them—are estimated to be using opioids long-term for chronic pain. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that nearly 14,000 U.S. deaths involved prescription opioids in 2006, more than triple the number in 1999. Between 1999 and 2006, nearly 65,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States were reported to involve opioid analgesics.
"Some studies have indicated that fatal opioid overdoses occur most often among people abusing prescription drugs or obtaining them from non-medical sources," Dr. Von Korff said. "But our results suggest that many overdoses may occur among people using prescribed opioids."
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