Patients treated with opioids for moderate to severe chronic back pain or knee or hip osteoarthritis pain saw no significant improvement when results were compared with treatment using acetaminophen or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in the randomized SPACE study.
These findings may help restructure how physicians treat patients with chronic pain in order to decrease the risk of opioid addiction in a population that is particularly susceptible.
©Rocky89/Thinkstock
“Long-term opioid therapy became a standard approach to managing chronic musculoskeletal pain despite a lack of high-quality data on benefits and harms,” wrote Erin E. Krebs, MD, MPH, core investigator at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Center for Chronic Disease Outcomes Research, and her colleagues. “Rising rates of opioid overdose deaths have raised questions about prescribing opioids for chronic pain management.”
In the 12-month SPACE (Strategies for Prescribing Analgesics Comparative Effectiveness) trial published March 6 in JAMA, the investigators reported randomizing a total of 240 patients to treatment with immediate-release opioids (morphine, oxycodone, or hydrocodone/acetaminophen) or acetaminophen or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. The patients came from the Minneapolis VA system between June 2013 and December 2015. Patients in the opioid group were on average 57 years old, while those in the nonopioid group had an average age of 60 years. Men comprised 87% of all patients, and both groups were predominantly white (86%-88%) with chronic back pain (65%). The investigators excluded patients with physiological opioid dependence from ongoing opioid use.