By Staff.

Does stopping long-term opioid treatment make chronic, non-cancer pain worse, unchanged or better? That’s a question researchers at Washington State University set out to study.

The researchers’ goal was to take a first step in understanding how ending long-term opioid therapy affects people with different types of pain. Their hope is to help doctors identify effective treatments other than opioids.

“On average, pain did not become worse among patients in our study a year after discontinuing long-term opioid therapy,” said Sterling McPherson, associate professor and director for biostatistics and clinical trial design at the WSU Elson F. Floyd College of Medicine.

Study Design

McPherson and his team at the Veteran Affairs Portland Health Care System and the Oregon Health & Science University used survey responses from 551 VA patients who had been on long-term opioid therapy for chronic, non-cancer-related pain for at least a year before discontinuing the medication.

Eighty-seven percent of the patients were diagnosed with chronic musculoskeletal pain, 6 percent with neuropathic pain, and 11 percent with headache pain, including migraines.

Participants rated their pain over two years, scoring it on a scale of 0-10 where 0 equals no pain and 10 equals the worst possible pain. The researchers used biostatistical analysis and computer modeling to characterize changes in pain intensity 12 months before the patients ended opioid therapy and the 12 months after.

While patients differed widely in the intensity of pain they experienced before and after stopping opioids their pain did not get worse and remained similar or slightly improved.

“Our results indicate that long term opioid therapy does not effectively manage patient pain intensity any more effectively than not receiving long-term opioid therapy,” McPherson said. “There are a variety of treatments available for the management of chronic pain other than opioids and our hope is that this research will help promote conversations about these alternatives between doctors and their patients.”

Next Steps

McPherson plans to collect additional data and conduct qualitative interviews with patients over the next year to try and determine why some patients experience greater reductions in pain than others after discontinuing long-term opioid therapy

“As part of our study, we grouped our patients into one of four categories based on the amount of pain they reported before and after discontinuing long-term opioid therapy,” McPherson said. “We are now going to try and understand what different mechanisms may be at work for reducing or increasing chronic pain for each of these sub-groups. Our hope is this will lead to being able to target specific sub-populations with different types of treatment for their chronic pain. In addition, we hope to continue to characterize potential adverse effects from being discontinued from long-term opioid therapy.”

McPherson’s study, which appears in the June edition of the journal Pain, is one of the first to investigate what, if any, are the potential adverse effects of discontinuing long term opioid therapy for chronic, non-cancer-related pain.