What’s a ‘Safe’ Number of Opioid Pills?

Subscribe today to listen to this content Get Access

One might say that new research is pointing to the Holy Grail of opioid prescribing: an evidence-based threshold. Researchers across three institutions—Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and New England Baptist Hospital—published a study in the August 17, 2022, edition of The Journal of Arthroplasty: “A Safe Number of Perioperative Opioids to Reduce the Risk of New Persistent Usage Among Opioid-Naïve Patients Following Total Joint Arthroplasty.”

Using a commercial claims database, the team identified 22,310 opioid-naïve patients who underwent primary total joint arthroplasty (TJA) between 2018 and 2019. They defined perioperative opioid exposure as total dose of opioid prescription in morphine milligram equivalents (MME) between one month before and two weeks after surgery. As for new persistent usage, they defined this as at least one opioid prescription between 90 and 180 days after surgery.