Pain is one of the most common reasons why patients visit the doctor. Non-opioid analgesics are used to relieve mild pain. Moderate and severe pain is treated by adding or switching to opioid analgesics. Frequent prescription for opioid analgesics increases the likelihood of misuse of these drugs. The misuse of opioids can lead to a major public health problem such as the opioid crisis, which is widespread in some parts of the world.
In this thesis, we analysed prescribing patterns of opioid analgesics between 2010 and 2019. The analysis was conducted using SPSS Statistics based on health claims data on prescriptions drugs obtained from the Health Insurance Institution of Slovenia.
In the analysis, we found that between 2010 and 2019 the annual consumption of weak opioid analgesics in the number of defined daily doses had remained roughly the same. In 2019, 12.4% more prescriptions were written for strong opioids than in 2010, but the consumption of strong opioids in the number of defined daily doses had decreased by 14.6% over this period of time. We observed significant differences between the prescribing patterns for individual active substances. We also noticed that prescribing of opioid analgesics in sustained-release dosage forms had decreased over the period.
We found that in 2019, almost one in sixteen Slovenian citizens received a prescription for an opioid analgesic. The number of recipients who received an opioid analgesic had decreased by 10.4% over the observation period. The number of recipients who received a prescription for an opioid analgesic increased steeply with age. Among the elderly (aged 65+), just over one in six Slovenian citizens received a prescription for an opioid analgesic. There were slightly more women among the recipients even if considered for age-sex structure. More than 91% of recipients received only weak opioids. Over the observation period, we observed an increase in the number of recipients who in a given year received only strong opioids.
The number of new recipients had decreased by 15.3% from 2011 to 2019. In total, 97% of the first prescriptions to new recipients were for weak opioids. New recipients were most often prescribed a combination of tramadol with paracetamol, while of the strong opioids, fentanyl, oxycodone, its combination with naloxone and, in recent years, tapentadol were the most commonly prescribed. As anticipated, we observed that new recipients tended to receive lower strengths of opioids on their first prescriptions.
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