The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove how certain types of surgery or a history of certain habits or medical conditions might cause chronic opioid use.
Other limitations include the potential for some chronic opioid prescriptions to be for conditions or operations not included in the study, the authors note. Some surgeries might also have been misclassified as major or minor procedures.
Even so, the findings add to evidence suggesting that prolonged opioid use after surgery might not be due to pain from operations, the authors conclude.
“Smoking and substance misuse have been previously associated with use of greater dosages of opioids and opioid misuse due, in part, to shared neurobiological mechanisms,” says Dr. Michael Hooten of the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn.
“In this particular study, the findings suggest that patients with pain prior to surgery were possibly treating other non-surgical sources of pain during the postoperative period using (drugs) initially prescribed for postoperative pain,” Hooten, who wasn’t involved in the study, says by email.
Reference
- Brummett CM, Waljee JF, Goesling J, et al. New persistent opioid use after minor and major surgical procedures in U.S. adults. JAMA Surg. 2017 Apr 12:e170504. doi: 10.1001/jamasurg.2017.0504. [Epub ahead of print]
