Opiate prescribing has blossomed into an appropriately huge issue in the current medical landscape. A fair bit of thought now goes into evaluating individuals for their potential for use and misuse – including even state-mandated prescription database review.
But, this interesting analysis suggests it should not only be the individual recipient considered when prescribing – but the impact on the health of the entire household. These authors compared administrative health care claims from 12,695,280 patients with a family member prescribed opiates against 6,359,639 patients whose family members were prescribed a non-opiate analgesic. Within one year, 11.68% of family members of those prescribed an opiate subsequently received their own, compared with 10.60% in the non-opiate cohort. After statistical adjustment, the absolute difference narrowed somewhat, and the authors also report their sensitivity analysis cannot rule out invalidation of their findings by an unmeasured confounder.
Regardless, this fits with my anecdotal experience – where many patients coming in for musculoskeletal pain have used a family member’s leftover opiate medication for breakthrough pain control. Despite the underlying limitations from this statistical analysis, it certainly seems to have face validity. It is reasonable to consider not just the individual patient being prescribed opiates, but also the risk to the household as being a gateway to subsequent opiate prescribing for family members.
“Association of Household Opioid Availability and Prescription Opioid Initiation Among Household Members”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2664515