The opioid epidemic has spurred a reconsideration of opioid prescription patterns, especially following surgery.
A team at University of Michigan Medical School, led by Mark Bicket, M.D., Ph.D. of the Department of Anesthesiology, notes a lack of evidence around prescription practices for patients who come to surgery on high doses of opioids for chronic conditions.
This isn’t a small gap given that 1 in 5 patients routinely use opioids or are on long term opioid therapy.
To examine how previous opioid use affects post-surgical opioid use, the U-M team investigated a cohort of 72,616 surgical patients.
Of those, 7.4% were on high-dose opioids, 19.5% were on low dose opioids and 73.1percent were not taking opioids prior to surgery.
Read more about the findings on Michigan Medicine’s Health Lab blog