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USPSTF to make first-ever recommendations regarding preventing opioid use disorder
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The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently announced it will, for the first time, review the evidence on preventing prescription and illicit opioid use disorder, according to a press release.
“While the crisis has been going on for a while, it is only recently that we have heard that evidence may be strong enough and substantial enough to meet the USPSTF criteria for researching and making recommendations regarding health care topics,” Alex H. Krist, MD, MPH, task force member and professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University, told Healio Family Medicine.
He said the USPSTF hopes to answer these questions as part of its systematic review:
- Do interventions to avert opioid use disorder that are viable for use in or referred from primary care improve patient health outcomes in persons not presently using opioids?
- Do interventions to avert opioid use disorder that are viable for use or referred from primary care prevent the initiation of unnecessary opioid use, reduce the amount of opioid use, or prevent prescription misuse in persons not presently using opioids?
- What are the harms of interventions to avert opioid use disorder that are viable for use in or referred from primary care in persons not presently using opioids?
“We will be looking for high-quality, impactful studies that answer these questions and give the USPSTF confidence that the recommendations it makes will improve health outcomes,” Krist said, adding that research gaps surrounding the prevention of prescription and illicit opioid use disorder will not be known until after the evidence is reviewed.
He added that the release of the research plan is the first step of a likely multiyear process and warned the findings may not be conclusive.
“We want to make sure we interpret the evidence correctly and put into a format that clinicians and patients can easily understand. Depending on what the evidence shows, we may recommend a certain preventive service to primary care physician, or we may decide there needs to be more evidence before a recommendation can be made,” he said.
Comments on the research plan can be submitted until Jan. 16, 2019 at www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/tfcomment.htm. Then, the final research plan will be posted, comments and evidence collected are reviewed, a draft recommendation is made, another call for comments is made and then a final USPSTF recommendation is made, according to Krist. – by Janel Miller
Disclosure: Krist reports no relevant financial disclosures.