Frequency of Early Refills for Opioids in the United States
| Autor: | Matthew H. Secrest, M. Soledad Cepeda, Syd Phillips, Gregory P Wedin, David M. Kern, Maribel Salas |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
PRIMARY CARE & HEALTH SERVICES SECTION
Early Refills medicine.medical_specialty Patient characteristics 01 natural sciences Drug Prescriptions Education 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Internal medicine Original Research Articles medicine Prevalence Humans 030212 general & internal medicine REMS 0101 mathematics Risk factor Medical prescription Retrospective Studies business.industry 010102 general mathematics Opioid abuse Substance Abuse Retrospective cohort study General Medicine Continuing medicine.disease Opioid-Related Disorders United States Substance abuse Analgesics Opioid Opioids Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine Opioid Prescription opioid Delayed-Action Preparations Opioid Abuse Neurology (clinical) business AcademicSubjects/MED00010 medicine.drug |
| Zdroj: | Pain Medicine: The Official Journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine |
| ISSN: | 1526-4637 |
| Popis: | Objective Refilling an opioid prescription early is an important risk factor of prescription opioid abuse and misuse; we aimed to understand the scope of this behavior. This study was conducted to quantify the prevalence and distribution of early refills among patients prescribed opioids. Methods We conducted a retrospective cohort study utilizing dispensed prescription records. Patients filling one or more prescription opioids were identified and followed for one year. Early refills were defined as having a second prescription filled ≥15% early relative to the days’ supply of the previous prescription for the same opioid (according to the National Drug Code [NDC]). The distribution of the number of early refills and patient characteristics were assessed. Results A total of 60.6 million patients met the study criteria; 28.8% had two or more opioid prescriptions for the same opioid during follow-up. Less than 3% of all patients receiving an opioid had an early refill. Approximately 10% of those with two or more opioid prescriptions for the same drug had an early refill. For patients with multiple fills (N = 1.5 million with extended-release long-acting [ER/LA] opioids; N = 17.1 million with immediate-release short-acting [IR/SA] opioids), early refills were more common among patients with an ER/LA opioid (18.5%) compared with an IR/SA opioid (8.7%). Three-quarters of patients with an early refill had only one (70.9% and 78.4% for ER/LA and IR/SA, respectively). Conclusion Refilling an opioid prescription with the same opioid early is an infrequent behavior within all opioid users, but more common in ER/LA users. Patients who refilled early tended to do so just once. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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