Narcotic Use Among People with Back Pain Increasing

Many people with back pain use power painkillers, despite clinical guidelines recommending that they must be used with appropriate discretion.

The latest study found that narcotic use for treatment of back pain increased from 19.3 percent to 29.1 percent between years 1999 and 2010.

Narcotics are pain relieving medications recommended for people who have severe pain that can't be treated with any other type of painkiller. These medications should always be used under the guidance of a physician. Types of narcotic medications include codeine, hydrocodone( vicodin) and hydromosphone. These drugs can be addictive.

"This is kind of concerning," Dr. Steven Cohen, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore told Reuters Health. Cohen wasn't a part of the current study.

Clinical recommendations for treatment of back pain include physical therapy and use of nonopioid analgesics, Donald E. Casey Jr., said in a commentary. The study shows that use of surgery, injections and scans along with powerful drugs to treat back pain has increased tremendously.

The study was conducted by researchers from Massachusetts' Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School who used data from the nearly 24,000 spine-problem cases that were registered 1999 to 2010.

They found that during the study period, use of acetaminophen decreased from 37 percent to 24 percent and physician referrals increased from 6.8 percent to 14 percent.

"Despite numerous published national guidelines, management of routine back pain increasingly has relied on advanced diagnostic imaging, referrals to other physicians, and use of narcotics, with a concomitant decrease in NSAID or acetaminophen use and no change in physical therapy referrals. With health care costs soaring, improvements in the management of back pain represent an area of potential cost savings for the health care system while also improving the quality of care," the study concluded.

The study is published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.