Relationship between Opioid Treatment and Rate of Healing in Chronic Wounds.

Shanmugam VK, Couch KS, McNish S, Amdur RL.

Wound Repair Regen. 2016 Nov 16. doi: 10.1111/wrr.12496. [Epub ahead of print]

450 people participated in this longitudinal observational study to investigate the relationship between opioids and wound healing.  Using fixed-effects models and time-to-event analysis, opioid dose was significantly associated with total wound surface area (p<0.0001); subjects with mean opioid dose ≥10mg were significantly less likely to heal than those with no opioid (HR 0.67 [0.49-0.91], p=0.011) after adjusting for wound size. People who never had opioids healed faster than those who received opioids (p=0.0009). The authors plan to correlate the exposure of opioids and clinical outcome data with tissue mRNA expression array data which might help understand the molecular mechanisms that may contribute to delayed wound healing.

Composed by Elaine Boland