Characteristics Associated With U.S. Outpatient Opioid Analgesic Prescribing and Gabapentinoid Co-Prescribing

Trajectories of pregabalin use and their association with longitudinal changes in opioid and benzodiazepine use

“…These findings are consistent with studies from the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America, which have consistently found high rates of concomitant use of opioids and pregabalin, which seem to be increasing over time. 32,38,44,47,49 Pregabalin is only subsidised for neuropathic pain refractory to other medicines; however, we found that nearly 6% of Australians initiated on pregabalin during our study period, a number well above expected numbers, given the prevalence of chronic neuropathic pain. 3 Furthermore, we found low rates of use of medicines commonly recommended to treat this condition, such as TCAs, SNRIs, and tramadol.…”

“…These findings are consistent with studies from the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America, which have consistently found high rates of concomitant use of opioids and pregabalin, which seem to be increasing over time. 32,38,44,47,49…”

Sociodemographic and clinical correlates of gabapentin receipt with and without opioids among a national cohort of patients with HIV

“…Our findings add to the growing literature characterizing the harmful co-prescribing of gabapentin and opioids among PWH and uninfected individuals (Buttram, Kurtz, Cicero, & Havens, 2019;Edelman et al, 2020;Gomes et al, 2017;Peckham, Evoy, et al, 2018;Peckham, Fairman, & Sclar, 2018a;Peckham & Sclar, 2019;Slavova et al, 2018;Smith et al, 2016). It has been suggested that clinicians, seeking alternatives to opioids and concerned about long-term adverse effects from non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, may more readily prescribe gabapentinoids either instead of these other classes or in efforts to taper them (Goodman & Brett, 2017;Mahase, 2020), and there may be considerable variation in practice across providers or sites of care, as we observed (Green, Cooke O'Dowd, Watt, Majeed, & Pinder, 2019).In a national study of visits to office-based physicians in 2015, 11.8% of medical encounters involved an opioid prescription, and, among these, 16.2% had a gabapentinoid prescription (St Clair et al, 2020). In that study, predictors of opioid-gabapentinoid co-receipt included patient age, peaking at age 55-64 years, as well as number of other medications, peaking at 10 or more.…”

Standardization of continuous and categorical covariates in sparse penalized regressions

“…In addition, we have compared the covariates selected by different standardization methods with the 71 characteristics associated with opioid prescriptions proposed in St Clair et al, 20 which identifies the characteristics based on the literature review, clinical relevance, and results from a random forest procedure on the 2015 NAMCS data (the present paper uses 2016 NAMCS data), and there are quite a few factors selected by both studies. Despite that the proposed method selects the least number of covariates, its selection set has more common covariates with St Clair et al 20 —16 common factors compared with 13 by None, Z-score, Gelman, Min–max methods and 19 by Bring method. It’s not surprising that Bring has more common factors with the reference study, but its selection performance is not necessarily better than the proposed methods, taking into account that Bring acutally selects twice as many factors as the proposed method.…”