Citation

Ramdin C, Makutonin M, Nelson LS, Meltzer AC, Mazer-Amirshahi M. Emerg. Med. J. 2023; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, BMJ Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1136/emermed-2023-213180

PMID

37669833

Abstract

Many overdose deaths are associated with patient co-use of opioids and other substances, such as benzodiazepines.1–3 However, the literature is sparse surrounding the characteristics, treatment, outcomes, costs, disposition and resource utilisation of people who co-use compared with those who use opioids alone.

This is an Institutional Review Board-exempt retrospective review of de-identified ED data available for the state of Maryland through the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) database from 2016 to 2018. We included patients who presented to the ED with opioid exposures either alone or with benzodiazepine, using ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases, 10TH Revision) codes (online supplemental file A). We censored the first 6 months of the dataset to remove patients with opioid only visits, to ensure that we captured only initial visits for co-use. Therefore, the observation window for this study was 1.5 years, where patients were followed for a year. We excluded cases that had missing demographic data in the initial visit when we conducted regression analyses. However, these cases were included in the univariate and outcome calculations. Sample size was based on available data. We used Welch’s t-test to compare patients who co-used …

Language: en

Keywords

emergency departments; toxicology