In-patient treatment of opiate dependence: medium-term follow-up outcomes

Abstract

Abstinence remains an attainable goal. As the principal influence on outcome was treatment adherence, inpatient services should seek to enhance rates of programme completion. After-care should be provided to patients. We caution against use of pre-treatment patient characteristics as criteria for prioritising access to in-patient treatment.

Patterns of adherence to oral methadone: Implications for prescribers

“…This figure is also similar to rates of abstinence following residential rehabilitation (Gossop, Green, Phillips, & Bradley, 1989;Smyth et al, 2005) and 12-week retention rates in substitute maintenance programs (National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, 2005). Adherence to medication in this study is thus consistent with others across a range of substance misuse, medical, and psychiatric conditions, and may reflect universal factors such as patient beliefs and attitudes to medical treatment, irrespective of the disorder requiring treatment.…”

Factors predicting completion in a cohort of opiate users entering a detoxification programme

“…One quarter of the opiate users in this national cohort study completed a successful detoxification within 3 months, which is consistent with other studies [7]. The majority of participants were young and over one-third were in their first treatment episode.…”

“…Smyth et al [7] reported that 23% of opiate-dependent patients were abstinent (i.e. neither using opiates nor on methadone maintenance) at follow-up after admission to an inpatient detoxification programme.…”

Prediction of Abstinence in Opioid-Dependent Patients

“…These results are in line with another study, which found that pretreatment patient characteristics are poor predictors of treatment outcome. 45 We only included patients who could really be rated as abstinent or nonabstinent at 1-month follow-up. Studies investigating treatment efficacy commonly use intention to treat analysis in which patients with missing data are allocated to one of the 2 groups (most of the time to the worst case scenario).…”