• Am J Emerg Med · Dec 2017

    Multicenter Study Observational Study

    Multicenter prevalence of opioid medication use as abortive therapy in the emergency department treatment of migraine headaches.

    • Neil Young, Daniel Silverman, Heather Bradford, and Jeffrey Finkelstein.
    • UCONN Integrated Residency in Emergency Medicine, Hartford, CT, United States. Electronic address: Neil.Young@stfranciscare.org.
    • Am J Emerg Med. 2017 Dec 1; 35 (12): 1845-1849.

    AbstractDespite a range of therapeutic options for treating acute migraine headaches, the use of opioids is still reported to be common practice. This study describes treatment practices in regards to migraines in the ED. It characterizes the prevalence of opioid orders during visits in three different settings, an academic medical center, a non-academic urban ED, and a community ED. Fourteen months of consecutive migraine visits were identified. All medications ordered were separated into first-line and rescue medications. Number of visits, length of stay, door to provider time, and total provider time were compared. A total of 1222 visits were identified. Opioids were ordered in 35.8% of these visits. By facility, opioids were ordered in 12.3% of academic medical center visits, 40.9% of urban ED visits, and 68.6% of community ED visits. This ranged from 6.9% of first-line therapies in the academic center to 69.9% of rescue therapies in the community ED. Of those who received opioids, 36.0% versus 25.1% required rescue medications. Patients who received opioids had more repeat visits, 1.79 versus 1.30. The academic center and urban ED both found greater than 30% decrease in length of stay in visits where opioids were not given. In the face of evidence against opioids for migraines, over one third of patients received them. There was a higher prevalence in the community setting. There were no significant benefits in overall throughput time, however, opioid visits required more rescue medications, increased length of stay, and resulted in more repeat visits.Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

Want more great medical articles?

Keep up to date with a free trial of metajournal, personalized for your practice.
1,624,503 articles already indexed!

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.