Grant: Operating Grant: Opioid Crisis Knowledge Synthesis

Opioids are often prescribed to treat pain, but are increasingly being prescribed injudiciously, which has led to high rates of prescription opioid addiction and fatal overdose in BC and Canada. Some people who are prescribed opioids for pain will have addiction while others will not. Little is known about why some people who are prescribed opioids for pain relief develop opioid addiction or opioid use disorder (OUD), but these conditions have become major drivers of the opioid epidemic as the opioid prescribing continues to increase. To better identify who is at risk of OUD, it is important to understand the neurobiological and social factors that might put someone at higher risk when they're prescribed opioids. Despite the costs to society of both chronic pain and OUD, knowledge on the identification of persons at risk of OUD has not been synthesized. More research is needed to better understand pain care with opioids and probability of OUD. We want to find out who is at risk of developing addiction to prescribed opioids. We will do this in three steps. First, we will look at all scientific literature on the risk of developing addiction to prescription opioids. Second, we will share our results with experts in the field and ask for their feedback. Third, we will use our results and expert feedback to create recommendations and tools (e.g., smartphone app) for emergency rooms and family physicians who prescribe opioids. We want to do this project as invited review for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Our centre has done two such invited reviews and is part of CIHR's national substance use network (Canadian Research Initiative on Substance Misuse - CRISM). This project will help prevent iatrogenic opioid addiction, and the overall prescription opioid epidemic, by synthesizing knowledge for opioid prescribers so they have better evidence to prescribe safely.