Corrigendum to ‘Trends in Opioid Prescriptions Among Part D Medicare Recipients from 2007 to 2012’ (The American Journal of Medicine (2016) 129(2) (221.e21–221.e30) (S0002934315009997) (10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.002))

The authors regret an error in our paper related to applying the definition of opioid-related overdose originally used by Dunn et al. The result of the error was to substantially underestimate the risk of emergency room (ER) and hospital admissions associated with prolonged use of either schedule II or III opioids. In the original paper we found significant associations of prolonged opioid use with ER visits or hospitalizations for opioid overdose, with ORs ranging from 1.4 to 1.8. After correcting the error, the ORs were much higher, from 2.2 to 15.8. The corrected table 3 is printed here (Table). These results are in line with previous publications.^1-3 There were no changes in other analyses. The pattern of the results remained unchanged. Our main findings on the increasing trend of prolonged opioid use over time, the variation of prolonged opioid use across states, and the limited impact of state laws on prolonged opioid use were not affected by the error and stayed the same. We apologize for the error. Appendix: Correction to: Trends in Opioid Prescriptions among Part D Medicare Recipients from 2007 to 2012 Corrected Results: Table 3 shows the rate of ER visits and hospitalizations related to potential overdose, stratified by prolonged opioid prescription of schedule II drugs, schedule III drugs, and combination. Prolonged combined opioid prescription was associated with higher rates of overdose-related acute care events. Rates of ER visits were 203.35 vs. 11.73 per 100,000 for patients with and without opioid prescriptions for schedule II/III combinations, respectively; for hospitalizations, these rates were 298.43 vs. 25.77 per 100,000. After adjusting for patient characteristics, the odds of having an ER visit related to potential overdose were substantially larger for schedule II than for schedule III prescriptions (OR: 15.78, 95% CI = 10.53 – 23.66 vs. OR: 4.50, 95% CI = 2.98 – 6.79). Results for hospitalization were similar. The correlations were not significant between the rate of prolonged opioid prescription use and the rates of ER visits or hospitalization across states.