CDC Issues Guidelines to Combat Inappropriate Opioid Prescribing

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued new guidelines for the dispensation of opioid prescriptions for the management of pain outside of cancer, palliative care, and end-of-life care. These new recommendations cover when to initiate opioid treatment, which opioids should be used first and for how long, and how to address potential harms associated with treatment. 

For each recommendation statement, the CDC provides a category: 

Category A recommendation: Applies to all persons; most patients should receive the recommended course of action.

Category B recommendation: Individual decision making needed; different choices will be appropriate for different patients. Clinicians help patients arrive at a decision consistent with patient values and preferences and specific clinical situations.

Evidence type, which is based on study design as well as a function of limitations in study design or implementation, imprecision of estimates, variability in findings, indirectness of evidence, publication bias, magnitude of treatment effects, dose-response gradient, and constellation of plausible biases that could change effects, is also provided for each statement: 

Type 1 evidence: Randomized clinical trials or overwhelming evidence from observational studies.

Type 2 evidence: Randomized clinical trials with important limitations, or exceptionally strong evidence from observational studies.

Type 3 evidence: Observational studies or randomized clinical trials with notable limitations.

Type 4 evidence: Clinical experience and observations, observational studies with important limitations, or randomized clinical trials with several major limitations.

Based on available evidence and expert opinion, the CDC recommends the following for pain management:

1. Nonpharmacologic therapy and nonopioid pharmacologic therapy are preferred for chronic pain. Clinicians should consider opioid therapy only if expected benefits for both pain and function are anticipated to outweigh risks to the patient. If opioids are used, they should be combined with nonpharmacologic therapy and nonopioid pharmacologic therapy, as appropriate (recommendation category: A, evidence type: 3).

2. Before starting opioid therapy for chronic pain, clinicians should establish treatment goals with all patients, including realistic goals for pain and function, and should consider how opioid therapy will be discontinued if benefits do not outweigh risks. Clinicians should continue opioid therapy only if there is clinically meaningful improvement in pain and function that outweighs risks to patient safety (recommendation category: A, evidence type: 4).

3. Before starting and periodically during opioid therapy, clinicians should discuss with patients known risks and realistic benefits of opioid therapy and patient and clinician responsibilities for managing therapy (recommendation category: A, evidence type: 3).

4. When starting opioid therapy for chronic pain, clinicians should prescribe immediate-release opioids instead of extended-release/long-acting (ER/LA) opioids (recommendation category: A, evidence type: 4).

5. When opioids are started, clinicians should prescribe the lowest effective dosage. Clinicians should use caution when prescribing opioids at any dosage, should carefully reassess evidence of individual benefits and risks when considering increasing dosage to ≥50 morphine milligram equivalents (MME)/day, and should avoid increasing dosage to ≥90 MME/day or carefully justify a decision to titrate dosage to ≥90 MME/day (recommendation category: A, evidence type: 3).

This article originally appeared on MPR