This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Chronic opioid therapy before lumbar arthrodesis yielded poor outcomes

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

Andrew J. Pugely

CHICAGO — Chronic opioid therapy prior to lumbar arthrodesis was associated with prolonged or continued postoperative use, as well as inferior outcomes and increased resource utilization, according to results presented at the North American Spine Society Annual Meeting.

Andrew J. Pugely, MD, and colleagues collected 90-day and 1-year and 2-year reoperation rates, resource utilization, complications and postoperative opioid use of approximately 29,000 patients who were either on chronic opioid therapy or were opioid-naïve prior to lumbar arthrodesis. Pugely said chronic opioid use was defined as patients on opioid prescriptions 3 months prior to surgery.

“At 90 days, the analysis that we went through identified several poor outcomes in those who were users vs. non-chronic users,” Pugely said in his presentation here. “The opioid users had higher rates of ED visits, epidural steroid injections, infections and thromboembolism.”

Pugely added patients who were chronic opioid users also had a high odds ratio of continued opioid use postoperatively. He noted these complications and outcomes persisted in the chronic opioid therapy group at both 1 year and 2 years postoperatively. Patients in the chronic opioid group experienced additional complications at 2 years, including renal failure, wound complications and other infections.

“These results emphasize the importance of identifying patients beforehand and trying to implement multidisciplinary modalities to help patients cope and potentially wean off of opioids beforehand,” Pugely said. – by Casey Tingle

Reference:

Eisenberg JM, et al. Abstract 142. Presented at: North American Spine Society Annual Meeting; Sept. 25-28, 2019; Chicago.

Disclosure: Pugely reports he receives IP royalties from Globus Medical; is a paid consultant for Globus Medical and United Health Care; receives other financial or material support from Medtronic; and is a board or committee member for the North American Spine Society.