Around half of patients who chronically use opioids before lumbar arthrodesis will continue to use opioids one-year postoperatively, according to a study in Spine.
Here are four things to know:
1. Study authors used a national commercial claims dataset from 2007 to 2015 to identify patients who underwent lumbar surgery.
2. The study included 26,553 lumbar surgery patients, of which 58.3 percent had an opioid prescription within three months before the procedure.
3. At one-year postoperatively, opioid users had a significantly higher narcotic prescription filling rate at 42.4 percent, compared to 8.6 percent for opioid naïve patients.
4. Preoperative opioid use was the greatest predictor of one-year narcotic use following anterior lumbar interbody fusion.