MedPage Today (2/27, Fiore) reported, “Patients of pain medicine specialists may be at greater risk of opioid overdose death than those who get their medications from primary care physicians,” according to an abstract presented at the American Academy of Pain Medicine meeting.
Specifically, “the proportion of patients in Utah who had scripts from pain doctors when they died of opioid overdose was three times higher than expected based on the percentage of opioid prescriptions those clinicians,” according to Christina Porucznik, PhD, of University of Utah, and colleagues.
“Although family practice physicians prescribed the most opioids overall, overdose deaths in patients who held scripts from them were only 50% higher than the proportion of opioid prescriptions they contributed.”
