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TEHRAN, July 29 -If you wind up in the emergency room with a minor injury, the likelihood you will be prescribed unnecessary opioids may depend on where the hospital is located, new research suggests.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -If you wind up in the emergency room with a minor injury, the likelihood you will be prescribed unnecessary opioids may depend on where the hospital is located, new research suggests.
For example, such prescriptions were much less likely to be offered in hospitals in Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and North Dakota, while they were much more likely to be offered in hospitals in Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
Overall, patients in high-prescribing states were three times more likely to be prescribed an unwarranted opioid than those in low-prescribing states, the researchers found.
The researchers focused on ankle sprains in the study because they're common and because "there is good consensus that opioids should be rarely used to treat this, given other strategies are just as -- or more -- effective for controlling pain," explained study author Dr. M. Kit Delgado. He's an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
Of nearly 31,000 patients who were treated for an ankle sprain between 2011 and 2015, one-quarter were prescribed an opioid such as oxycodone (Oxycontin) or hydrocodone (Vicodin). And opioid prescribing did dip during the study period, from a national average of 28 percent in 2011 to 20 percent by 2015, the findings showed.
But after digging deeper, the investigators found that in "high-prescribing states, mostly concentrated in the southern U.S., the [opioid] prescribing rate was around three times higher than in low-prescribing states."
Delgado suggested that state variations in opioid laws, guidelines and monitoring likely play a role, as well as differences in the severity of local opioid crises.
"There may [also] be regional differences in how doctors practice," he added, as well as "how doctors weighed the risks and benefits of prescribing an opioid."
The findings were published online July 24 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
According to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), more than 2 million Americans struggled with opioid misuse -- and 33,000 died -- in 2015.
NIDA experts also noted that between 21 percent and 29 percent of patients who are initially prescribed an opioid for legitimate medical concerns end up misusing them over time.
Source:Reuters
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