While ankle sprain injuries are common, a new report from Michigan Medicine suggests that the rate of opioids prescribed to those patients have become uncommonly high.

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“The opioid epidemic is well documented in this country,” says James R. Holmes, M.D., service chief of foot and ankle, and an associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Michigan Medicine.

“Physician prescribing and over-prescribing is part of the problem.”

Holmes is the senior author on a new brief research report, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, that examined the rates of opioids prescribed to patients who experienced an ankle sprain injury.

The research team examined data from a health insurance claims database and found that of the nearly 592,000 patients diagnosed with an ankle sprain during the selected nine-year period, 11.9 percent filled an opioid prescription within seven days of diagnosis.