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MONDAY, June 22, 2020 (HealthDay News) — About one in 10 heart<\/a> surgery patients who is prescribed an opioid painkiller after the procedure still uses the drugs<\/a> more than 90 days later, a new study finds.<\/p>\n And those prescribed the highest doses are most likely to be long-term users of opioids, researchers say.<\/p>\n “Our findings support a much-needed shift toward decreasing opioid dosages at discharge and using alternative approaches to reduce the risk for persistent opioid use,” study lead author Dr. Chase Brown said in a University of Pennsylvania news release. He’s a cardiovascular surgery resident and research fellow at the university’s Perelman School of Medicine.<\/p>\n Overprescribing of opioids — including oxycodone<\/a>, codeine<\/a>, tramadol<\/a> and morphine — can increase the risk of opioid addiction<\/a>. Recent research suggests that opioid overprescribing is common in the United States.<\/p>\n It’s believed that persistent opioid use occurs in 3% to 10% of patients after minor and major general surgery, but there is limited large-scale research on the issue among U.S. heart<\/a> surgery patients.<\/p>\n In this new study, researchers examined data on over 25,000 U.S. patients who had coronary artery bypass<\/a> grafting (the most common type of heart surgery) and over 10,000 who had heart valve repair or replacement between 2004 and 2016.<\/p>\n About 60% of bypass patients and 53% of valve surgery patients filled an opioid prescription within 14 days after surgery.<\/p>\n The study also found that 9.6% of all the patients continued to fill prescriptions between three and six months after surgery, with the refill rate slightly higher among bypass patients. Nearly 9% of bypass patients continued to fill an opioid prescription six to nine months after surgery.<\/p>\n Rates of long-term opioid use were highest among women, younger patients and those who had medical conditions before surgery, such as heart failure<\/a>, chronic lung disease, diabetes<\/a> and kidney failure<\/a>, the findings showed.<\/p>\n The researchers also found that patients who were prescribed higher doses of opioids had a significantly increased risk of continued opioid use three to six months after surgery.<\/p>\n “Cardiothoracic surgeons, cardiologists and primary care physicians should work together to enact evidence-based protocols to identify high-risk patients and minimize prescriptions via a multi-faceted pain management<\/a> approach,” said study senior author Dr. Nimesh Desai, a cardiovascular surgeon and an associate professor of surgery at the university.<\/p>\n “Centers must adopt protocols to increase patient education and limit opioid prescriptions at discharge,” Desai concluded.<\/p>\n The study was published online June 17 in JAMA Cardiology<\/i>.<\/p>\n — Robert Preidt<\/p>\n![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
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