Since the height of the opioid epidemic, doctors have been prescribing fewer of these medications. A new study from UC San Francisco shows this trend extends to nursing home residents who may need opioids to manage chronic pain.
Analyzing data on nearly 3 million U.S. nursing home residents between 2011 and 2022, researchers found the probability of receiving an opioid declined across the board, even for nursing home residents with severe chronic pain.
The study, which uses data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), is the first to examine opioid prescribing trends in nursing homes and to examine these trends by race, ethnicity, and pain level. It appears Nov. 3 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released opioid guidelines designed to reduce overprescribing in outpatient care. Yet this seems to have unintentionally shifted prescribing practices in other settings.
“Older adults in nursing homes really shouldn’t be as impacted by the CDC opioid guidelines,” said the paper’s first author, Ulrike Muench, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the UCSF School of Nursing. “The prevalence of chronic pain in nursing homes is high because of the multiple medical issues that often accompany older age, and these residents are not the ones most at risk for misusing these medications.”
Read the complete story on the UCSF News webpage.