Results from a 12-year study involving more than 14,000 Kaiser Permanente members’ electronic health records shows the risk of opioid overdose increases when doses vary over time.
The $2 million, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and conducted by researchers at Kaiser Permanente’s Institute for Health Research, was published April 19 in the JAMA Network Open.
The results indicate that remediating the addictive risks of the drugs is not as simple as taking patients off their long-term opioid medication. In fact, the study by the national payer organization shows that it might be better to never have prescribed opioids in the first place, say co-authors Jason Glanz, Ingrid Binswanger, MD and Susan M. Shetterly.
