Photo Credit: Rattankun

The following is a summary of “Prescription time trends in patients with high-impact chronic pain: A National Patient Registry Study,” published in the October 2024 issue of Pain by Bruun et al. 

High-impact chronic pain (HICP), affecting daily function, impacting about 8% of the Western population, though its prevalence in Denmark remained largely unexamined at the population level. 

Researchers conducted a retrospective to investigate time trends in analgesic and sedative prescriptions, socioeconomic factors, and hospital diagnoses among Danish patients visiting pain centers from 2005 to 2022. 

They used data from the Central Person Registry, Danish National Patient Registry, and Danish National Prescription Registry, along with socioeconomic data from Statistics Denmark. The Prescription data was gathered for the 3 months preceding the first pain center visit, categorized into 5 periods: before 2011, 2011–2013, 2014–2016, 2017–2019, and 2020–2022. 

The results showed a significant decrease in pre-referral prescriptions for opioids (53.2% to 31.7%), NSAIDs (28.3% to 23.5%), antidepressants (20.5% to 16.8%), anxiolytics (12.3% to 3.2%), and sleep medication (15.8% to 7.6%) over 15 years among 66,577 pain center referrals. Conversely, there was an increase in paracetamol (31.1% to 48.9%) and gabapentinoid (19.2% to 27.7%) prescription. 

They concluded that patients with HICP, pre-referral opioid prescriptions decreased over 15 years, while gabapentinoid prescriptions increased. 

Source: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ejp.4746