Loading...
Long-acting opioids are associated with excess risk for death from accidental overdose, but they also can cause other potentially life-threatening adverse events. In this retrospective cohort study, investigators used a Tennessee Medicaid database to examine all-cause mortality in patients with chronic noncancer pain and no evidence of palliative care who received new prescriptions for either long-acting opioids or nonnarcotic drugs in the anticonvulsant and tricyclic antidepressant drug classes (e.g., gabapentin, amitriptyline). Nearly 23,000 long-acting–opioid patients were propensity-score matched on more than 100 demographic and clinical characteristics (e.g., age, sex, chronic pain diagnoses, psychiatric diagnoses, cardiovascular and o…