A group of clinicians is hoping to prompt a rethink of how opioids are prescribed to new mothers after cesarean deliveries after finding that sending patients home with smaller prescriptions led to dramatic drops in use of the drugs.
In research scheduled to be presented Saturday at the 2022 annual meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) in San Diego, women undergoing cesarean delivery were randomly assigned to receive prescriptions for either 10 or 20 oxycodone tablets at discharge. Interim data revealed that not only did 10-tablet prescriptions correlate with significantly less opioid consumption, 35% of all women left their opioid scripts unfilled.
The results suggest physicians should stop "automatically prescribing opioids for caesarean section patients at discharge and, instead, work on individualized prescribing," said Amanda Selk, MD, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Toronto, Canada, who was not involved with the study.
"We need to move away from a culture that says a patient can't be discharged without an opioid prescription," Selk told Medscape Medical News.
For the study, researchers at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, Roanoke, Virginia, set out to understand how discharge opioid prescription sizes impact opioid consumption in women who undergo caesarean delivery.
