The pendulum may have swung too far in the direction of caution when it comes to limiting opioids for adolescents who are in pain, according to new research from a University of Alberta emergency medicine team published in Pediatrics. The investigators examined a long-held belief by clinicians and parents that an opioid prescription for pain from a torn muscle or broken limb could put a teenager at higher risk for future opioid-related harms such as overdose or addiction.
"You feel this hesitancy about prescribing opioids because it's been drilled into us from the media that opioid prescriptions are why we have the opioid crisis," says study lead Dr. Henry Li, an emergency physician at the University of Alberta Hospital and pediatric emergency medicine fellow at the Stollery Children's Hospital. "On every shift, we see how the opioid crisis is impacting the patients that we serve, and we really don't want to be contributing to that."
The team tracked population-level data for nearly 1.2 million emergency department visits by Alberta youths ages 12–17 between 2010 and 2020. They assessed trends in opioid prescribing, then looked to see how those numbers compared with signals of opioid-related harms in the same population—events like emergency department visits or hospital admissions for opioid withdrawal or overdose, or starting a prescription for an opioid abuse disorder treatment such as methadone or Suboxone.
