SAN DIEGO – Less than 30% of veterans on medication-assisted treatment for opioids had a diagnosis of opioid use disorder, and only 7% of veterans with an opioid use disorder initiated medication-assisted treatment.
Doug Brunk/MDedge News
Dr. Lisham Ashrafioun
Those are key findings from a large study that set out to assess factors associated with initiating medication-assisted treatment (MAT) among veterans seeking pain care and to characterize the cohort of veterans seeking specialty pain care who initiated MAT.
“ but it was really low,” lead study author Lisham Ashrafioun, PhD, said in an interview at the annual meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence. “These findings are preliminary, but I think we need to understand a lot more about how to treat people with opioid use disorders who are receiving pain care as well.”
Dr. Ashrafioun, a research investigator at the Veteran Affairs Center of Excellence for Suicide Prevention at the Canandaigua VA Medical Center, N.Y., and his associates drew from national VA electronic medical record data to identify 219,443 veterans who initiated specialty pain services during fiscal year 2012-2014. They used procedure and billing codes to identify veterans who started using MAT for opioids within the year following initiation of pain services, and extracted data on demographics, psychiatric and medical diagnoses, and pain intensity scores.
Of the 219,443 veterans, only 2,406 had received MAT in the year following the index visit (1.1%). In addition, only 26.4% of those on MAT had an opioid use disorder and just 6.6% of those with an opioid use disorder initiated MAT.
In adjusted analyses, opioid use disorders (adjusted odds ratio, 5.71) and opioid prescriptions (aOR, 2.33) were significantly associated with greater odds of receiving MAT. Moreover, having a diagnosis of depression was associated with a greater odds of receiving MAT (aOR, 1.26), while having a diagnosis of PTSD was associated with a greater odds of not receiving it (aOR, 0.90). The researchers also found that having a diagnosis of alcohol use disorder was associated with a greater odds of not receiving MAT (aOR, 0.85), while having a diagnosis of drug use disorder was associated with a greater odds of receiving it (aOR, 1.32).
Dr. Ashrafioun, who also holds a faculty position in the department of psychiatry at the University of Rochester (N.Y.), acknowledged certain limitations of the study. For example, the sample was restricted to only those receiving specialty pain care, provider and facility variation was not accounted for, and study participants might have initiated MAT outside of the VA.
He reported having no financial disclosures.