ST. LOUIS — A Washington University study has found higher incidence of prescription opioid use among recovering COVID-19 patients, suggesting doctors are using the potent painkillers to treat the lingering effects of the virus — and leading the study's main author to caution against such a trend.
The study was released last month in the journal Nature. Its main finding showed that individuals recovering from COVID-19 had an increased risk of death over the following six months, when compared with the general population. The study involved records of more than 87,000 patients who had tested positive for COVID-19, and nearly 5 million control patients in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care databases.
But more recently, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University and senior author of the study, has been trying to alert health care providers of one particular finding: For every 1,000 patients, there were about nine more opioid prescriptions in the group of patients who previously had COVID-19 than in the general public.
