People who received prescriptions for opioid painkillers in the months before elective abdominal operations had longer hospital stays and a higher chance of needing follow-up care in a hospital or rehabilitation facility than patients who didn’t take medications before the same operations.
The extra care translated into as much as double or triple health care costs.
The new findings, published in the Annals of Surgery, are enough to prompt the researchers to suggest that pre-operation opioid use should be considered a preoperative risk factor.
“We often pause when we are considering elective surgery with a patient, based on known risk factors such as smoking, anticoagulant use, and overall medical conditions. These findings suggest that perhaps preoperative opioid use warrants the same awareness,” says lead author Jennifer Waljee, a plastic surgeon at Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan’s academic medical center.
Is it time to rethink post-surgery painkillers?
Options such as tapering down opioid doses and alternative pain relief approaches could be options prior to surgery. But also, she says, “Physicians should make a plan to manage the patient’s pain during the perioperative period that takes into account their past opioid use.”
“The bottom line is that preoperative opioid use is an important and potentially modifiable risk factor prior to surgery…”
Past research has suggested that chronic opioid use may lead to tolerance and can increase sensitivity to pain—leaving patients more vulnerable after an operation.
Before doing the study, researchers identified similar trends in Michigan hospitals using data from the Michigan Surgical Quality Collaborative, led by medical student David Cron and initially published in July 2016 before being included in the new issue of Annals. In that study, 21 percent of patients used opioids prior to surgery. They had a substantially higher risk of complications, readmissions, and higher costs.
The new study uses national claims data drawn from private insurance companies. Researchers looked at more than 200,000 middle-class Americans who had common operations—hysterectomies, bariatric surgery, hernia repair, and reflux surgery—over a 42-month period, and who spent at least one night in the hospital.
About 9 percent of the patients had filled at least two opioid prescriptions within the 90 days before their operation—including at least one within a month before the operation. They tended to have more medical and psychological conditions than non-opioid patients.
Survey shows lots of people save leftover painkillers
The patients who had been prescribed opioids before surgery spent an average of an extra half a day in the hospital after their operations—even after adjusting for a wide range of co-existing factors such as medical conditions and demographic characteristics.
They also were more likely to end up back in the hospital or to go to a rehabilitation facility within 30 days of the operation—except for those taking the lowest-possible doses. These difference weren’t huge—4.5 percent of opioid users had a hospital readmission, compared with 3.6 percent of those who hadn’t taken opioids. But they were enough to make a difference in cost.
In the first 90 days after surgery, those who had been taking opioids had medical costs three times higher than those who hadn’t. The gap narrowed as time went on, but even at a year post-surgery, the pre-surgery opioid users had twice the medical costs—at about $25,000—as those who hadn’t been taking the drugs, who came in at an average of $12,113.
These data add to a growing body of evidence that in general shows that patients who take opioid painkillers on an ongoing basis use more medical care, and have higher medical costs, than those who don’t.
“The bottom line is that preoperative opioid use is an important and potentially modifiable risk factor prior to surgery, and should be on surgeons’ radar as well as the minds of primary care providers,” Waljee says. “Coordinating care throughout the surgical period could improve clinical outcomes and the patient experience.”
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded the work.
Source: University of Michigan
