Opioids painkillers do not treat chronic hip, knee or back pain any better than less addictive painkillers, new research has found.
As the opioid epidemic continues to claim American lives, more physicians and clinics are looking for alternatives to the addictive drugs.
Veterans Affairs clinics across the US compared how well opioid and other medications, such as Advil, restored basic functions like walking, working and sleeping to former service men and women.
In the small study, opioids offered no advantage to people suffering from chronic back, hip or knee pain.
Prescription opioids offered no advantage over less addictive drugs, like Advil, for veterans with chronic pain, a new study found
Prescription opioids – like the blockbuster drug Oxycontin – have long been the go-to treatment for chronic pain.
An estimated 11 percent of Americans suffer from chronic pain, and about 20 percent of veterans do.
But the widespread use of opioids to treat the condition has led to a massive spate of addiction, and veterans have been particularly vulnerable.
As of 2008, 11 percent of American veterans reported that they had misused prescription opioids at some point, and the majority of the drugs were opioids.
American health officials and President Trump have, in the last year, been making increasingly public efforts to curtail the opioid epidemic.
Yet those efforts have run up against people debilitated by persistent pain, who have voiced concerns that, without the popular treatment, they will be unable to function.
Some experts have worried that the US government does not fully understand the opioid crisis and that its efforts to stop the epidemic have been misguided.
Dr Warren Bickel, a Virginia Tech University neuroscientist, is briefing the White House today in an effort to educate officials on the nature of addiction in the hopes that expertise like his can help guide the administrations next move in the battle against opioid addiction.
Dr Bickel, director of the Virginia Tech Addiction Recovery Center, has worked to develop opioid replacement therapies to help ween addicts off of opioids so that they can find pain relief without the long-term consequences of the powerful drugs.
Public health researchers and experts have suggested that the attack needs to be two-fold, incorporating both a better understanding and destigmatization of addiction and new ways of treating pain.
Researchers at Veterans Affairs (VA) clinics across the country recruited 240 people with chronic pain to split into two treatment groups – opioid and nonopioid – in order to assess if the addictive drugs really were the only path to pain relief.
Half of the subjects for the study, published in JAMA, were given a fast-acting opioid, either in the form of morphine, oxycodone, or hydrocodone/aceteminophen (a combination of an opioid and nonopioid painkiller) at the start of their treatment plans.
The other group received either aceteminophen only or a nonsterioidal anti-inflammatory drug.
The target for each patient was basic functionality with tolerable pain. Their doctors wanted them to be able to walk, sleep and work.
Over the course of a year, they monitored the veterans for functionality and for pain intensity.
The patients also filled out drug misuse screening surveys over the course of the study so that the researchers could gauge how significant the risk of addiction was.
By the end of the research period, there was almost no difference between the abilities of the two groups to function or in their pain levels.
Veterans that took opioids rated pain’s interference with their daily activities at an average of 3.4 out of 10. Those that took nonopioids rated interference at 3.3.
The group that took nonopioids actually reported ‘significantly better’ pain intensity. After 12 months, the nonopioid group said their pain level was a 3.5 out of 10, compared to a 4.0 for the opioid group.
Notably, in the study, there was also little difference in the risk – which was low – between the two groups.
The researchers concluded that the opioids caused ‘significantly’ more severe side effects than the alternatives, and that ‘overall, opioids did not demonstrate any advantage over nonopioid medications that could potentially outweigh their greater risk of harms.’