ArticleJournal of the American Medical Directors Association2025
Outcomes of Discontinuing Long-Term Opioid Therapy among Older Cancer Survivors in Long-Term Care Settings.
Article in Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesClinical decisions to continue or discontinue long-term opioid therapy (LTOT; ≥3 months) for older cancer survivors remain challenging due to limited evidence on the risks and benefits of this treatment practice. This study aims to examine the associations of discontinuing LTOT with clinical and opioid-related adverse event (ORAE) outcomes among older cancer survivors residing in long-term care (LTC) settings. DESIGNS: This retrospective cohort study analyzed data from the 100% Medicare nursing home sample from 2010 to 2021. SETTING AND
participantsLTC residents aged ≥65 years who were survivors of cancer for at least 1 year and received LTOT for chronic pain.
methodsDiscontinuation of LTOT was defined as no prescription opioid refills for at least 90 days. Clinical outcomes included worsening pain, physical function, and depression; ORAE outcomes included counts of pain-related hospitalizations, pain-related emergency department visits, opioid use disorder, and opioid overdose. We used modified Poisson models for clinical outcomes and Poisson models for ORAE outcomes, adjusting baseline covariates via inverse probability of treatment weighting.
resultsOf 21,861 episodes of cancer survivors with LTOT, 18,984 survivors (86.8%) continued LTOT, whereas 2877 survivors (13.2%) discontinued LTOT. The discontinuers vs continuers had lower adjusted risk of worsening pain (relative risk 0.65, 95% CI 0.59-0.74, P < .001) and lower adjusted rates of opioid use disorder (rate ratio 0.76, 95% CI 0.64-0.90, P < .001) and opioid overdose (rate ratio 0.33, 95% CI 0.21-0.52, P < .001) at the 1-year follow-up, with no difference in physical function and depressive symptoms or rates of pain-related hospitalizations and emergency department visits. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Discontinuing vs continuing LTOT was associated with lower risk of worsening pain, opioid use disorder, and opioid overdose, with nondifferential risks of the other studied outcomes. Discontinuing vs continuing LTOT may confer benefits that outweigh risks among older LTC cancer survivors.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.