Need for Improved Care of Cardiac Surgery Patients With Opioid Use Disorder

Abstract

Numerous studies have evaluated the relationships between opioid prescription and use with the care and outcomes of patients undergoing cardiac surgical procedures. In this issue of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, Dewan and colleagues1 use the Nationwide Readmissions Database (NRD) to evaluate whether patients with diagnosed opioid use disorder (OUD) have greater risk of readmission after cardiac surgery than those without diagnosed OUD. Note that while 1% of their cohort was coded as having OUD, this proportion is much smaller than those with any opioid use presenting for cardiac surgery, which we found to be 10% at our institution.