There has been a recent increase in the prescribing of pharmaceutical opioids to Chronic Non-Cancer Pain (CNCP) patients in Australia which has led to increasing professional and public concern about the use and harms that may be related to such use. Despite this, there is very little known about the magnitude of risk for adverse events. Previous Australian research has had limited duration (~ 12 weeks) and/or have not examined aberrant drug use behaviours.
The Pain and Opioids IN Treatment (POINT) study, conducted from 2012 to 2015, was the first Australian study to examine the patterns of prescribing for individual patients, and the outcomes for these patients in the longer term.
Funding for POINT II was received from the NHMRC in December 2015, allowing another three years of follow up interviews to track the POINT cohort.
Through another three years of follow up interviews, POINT II will further be able to shed light on the extent to which patients experience problematic opioid use, some of the precursors and protective factors to problematic use, and the consequences of problematic opioid use resulting from chronic opioid therapy. It will lead to improved knowledge of dose escalation and the positive and negative outcomes for those who undergo rapid dose escalation and ultimately end up using high doses of opioid analgesics.
POINT II also aims to establish a long term trajectory of potential impacts on health care use and costs. It will investigate patient preferences for interventions that improve pain and functioning, providing insight into why some ineffective but expensive treatments are used and why long term opioid use persists even in light of little clinical benefit.
Finally, the project will achieve the establishment of a cohort of Australians with chronic health problems. The project will provide the groundwork for further follow-up of the sample to determine the longer-term outcomes for chronic pain patients.
