Specifically, the study found that 21 percent of short-term opioid patients end up getting prescriptions that extend for as much as three to four months. Another 6 percent actually continued the medications for longer than four months.
People with a prior history of either smoking and/or drug abuse appear to be at greatest risk for turning a short-term pain treatment into a long-term drug abuse problem.
Why? Hooten’s team believes that addiction to nicotine or other substances may have the same effect on the brain as using the narcotic painkillers.
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“Many people will suggest [painkiller abuse is] actually a national epidemic,” Hooten said in a Mayo news release. “More people now are experiencing fatal overdoses related to opioid use than compared to heroin and cocaine combined,” he added.
Patients must learn “to recognize the potential risks associated with these medications,” Hooten said. For some patients, “I encourage use of alternative methods to manage pain, including non-opioid analgesics or other non-medication approaches,” he said.
Avoiding narcotic painkillers “reduces or even eliminates the risk of these medications transitioning to another problem that was never intended,” Hooten said.
His team published their findings in the July issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
“The next step in this research is to drill down and find more detailed information about the potential role of dose and quantity of medication prescribed,” Hooten said. “It is possible that higher dose or greater quantities of the drug with each prescription are important predictors of longer-term use.”
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Copyright HealthDay News July 2015.