ArticleBritish journal of cancer2025
Ethnic disparities in opioid prescribing for cancer pain and associated emergency department visits and hospital admissions in the last three months of life: a retrospective cohort study.
Article in British journal of cancer, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cancer pain.Nature reviews. Disease primers · 2026Review
- Multimodal Management of Pain in Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Mechanism-Based Approach.Current pain and headache reports · 2026Review
- Identifying aspects of palliative and end-of-life care that are most important to people with lived experience and can be measured using routine data: a series of patient and public involvement workshops.Journal of patient-reported outcomes · 2026Article
- Key issues in palliative and supportive care research, policy and practice.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2026Article
- Patient-centred educational interventions for assessing and managing cancer-related pain relevant to minority ethnic populations: A mixed-methods systematic review.Palliative care and social practice · 2026Review
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
backgroundEthnic inequalities in pain management at the end of life remain underexplored in the UK. We examined associations between patient ethnicity, opioid prescribing, and related healthcare use among cancer decedents.
methodsRetrospective cohort study including 232,329 adults (≥18 years) diagnosed with cancer between 2011 and 2021. Primary care records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum were linked to hospital and mortality data. Person-time rates of opioid prescriptions, emergency department (ED) visits, and hospital admissions in the last three months of life were estimated. Poisson regression with Generalised Estimating Equations generated adjusted rate ratios (aRRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), controlling for relevant covariates.
resultsOf 3,987,635 opioid prescriptions, 620,232 (16%) occurred in the final three months. Prescription rates were highest among White patients (969.97-894.43/1000 person-months). Compared with White patients, prescribing was significantly lower among Black (aRR 0.91, 95% CI 0.87-0.95), South Asian (aRR0.93, CI0.89-0.97), Mixed (aRR 0.85, CI 0.79-0.92) and Other ethnic groups (aRR 0.90, CI 0.85-0.96). Patients from minority ethnic backgrounds, particularly Black and South Asian, more often experienced ≥2 ED visits and ≥2 hospital admissions.
conclusionMinority ethnic patients with cancer receive fewer opioids and experience higher acute care use near the end of life. Tackling system-level inequities is critical to achieving pain management.
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.