A new study has found that opioid tapering was associated with an approximately 50% increased incidence of overdose or withdrawal and a mental health crisis, compared with the period before.
“Previously, we published results showing that opioid tapering after long-term stable dosing was connected to overdose and mental health crisis events during a one-year follow-up period,” said principal investigator Joshua Fenton, MD, MPH, a professor and the vice chair of research in family and community medicine at the University of California, Davis. “We hypothesized that in the longer run, opioid dose reduction might actually be associated with reduced risks as patients grow accustomed to lower opioid doses. We therefore extended the follow-up on the patients who tapered in our original cohort study to examine associated risks up to two years after taper initiation.”