Buprenorphine compliance rates

Choose you evidence carefully by rocket ship

The following abstract popped up today.

The purpose of the study was to look at factors associated with completion of the 6 month, primary care based program.

What struck me was the completion rate–35.7%. For all the crowing about ORT, this seems really low. (And, they said this completion rate is consistent with prior studies.) This is particularly underwhelming when the researchers identify physical injury as a predictor of completions and speculate that this is related to chronic pain. These subjects constitute 71.7% of completers. So…when you omit those with injuries, the completion rate drops to 24%.

Primary care patient characteristics associated with completion of 6-month buprenorphine treatment

BACKGROUND: Opioid addiction is prevalent in the United States. Detoxification followed by behavioral counseling (abstinence-only approach) leads to relapse to opioids in most patients. An alternative approach is substitution therapy with the partial opioid receptor agonist buprenorphine, which is used for opioid maintenance in the primary care setting. This study investigated the patient characteristics associated with completion of 6-month buprenorphine/naloxone treatment in an ambulatory primary care office.
METHODS: A retrospective chart review of 356 patients who received buprenorphine for treatment of opioid addiction was conducted. Patient characteristics were compared among completers and non-completers of 6-month buprenorphine treatment.
RESULTS: Of the 356 patients, 127 (35.7%) completed 6-month buprenorphine treatment. Completion of treatment was associated with counseling attendance and having had a past injury.
CONCLUSIONS: Future research needs to investigate the factors associated with counseling that influenced this improved outcome. Patients with a past injury might suffer from chronic pain, suggesting that buprenorphine might produce analgesia in addition to improving addiction outcome in these patients, rendering them more likely to complete 6-month buprenorphine treatment. Further research is required to test this hypothesis. Combination of behavioral and medical treatment needs to be investigated for primary care patients with opioid addiction and chronic pain.

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