By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

Healthcare providers have become more cautious in recent years about giving opioid pain medication to children, fearing that even short-term use could lead to a lifetime of addiction or even a fatal overdose.

But in a review at the University of Alberta, pediatric researchers found little evidence to support a link between short-term opioid use in childhood and opioid use disorder (OUD) later in life.

“We actually didn’t find a lot of evidence to directly answer our question,” said senior author Michele Dyson, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and associate director of the Alberta Research Centre for Health Evidence.

“If opioids are used as indicated, they can be a safe and effective strategy for pain management,” she said. “In some cases, they really are part of the best treatment plan to manage a child’s pain.”

Dyson and her colleagues reviewed 21 observational studies involving nearly 50 million patients under the age of 18 who were exposed to opioids for less than 14 days. Most of the studies were considered low quality and did not look at the duration of opioid use.

One study did show a potential link between short-term exposure and later abuse. But researchers concluded the findings overall were not definitive because they did not specify duration of exposure or lacked a control group. Their findings are reported in the journal Pediatrics.

“There is limited evidence to determine if short-term therapeutic exposure to opioids in childhood is
definitively associated with future nonmedical opioid use or development of an OUD; however, this review suggests a link between lifetime therapeutic opioid use (unknown duration) and nonmedical opioid use. The existing evidence on risk factors for nonmedical opioid use or OUD after short-term therapeutic exposure is unclear,” researchers concluded.

Conflicting Advice

Whether opioid medication is appropriate for children is a controversial issue. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) released new guidelines recommending that opioids only be used for children who are dying or seriously ill and not expected to recover.

Like the Alberta study, a WHO advisory panel found little good quality research on how to treat childhood pain, but recommended that children with chronic pain be treated with physical therapy and psychological interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy.  

An international study in The Lancet came to a very different conclusion, warning that opioid prescribing guidelines intended for adults are being “inappropriately applied to young people.” Because of the stigma associated with opioids, researchers said childhood pain was often untreated or poorly treated, leading to chronic pain, disability and other negative consequences in adulthood.

“Health-care professionals, young people, and parents continue to hold misconceptions and believe myths about opioid use in pediatric patients, whereby the media depicts opioids as the villain and the underlying reason for substance misuse,” researchers said. “Opioids have their place in pediatric pain medicine.”

That finding is at odds with a 2018 warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which said that cough and cold medications containing opioids pose “serious risks” to children and should no longer be prescribed to patients younger than 18.

A recent study found that opioid misuse is relatively rare in U.S. adolescents and young adults. Less than 1% of those who filled an opioid prescription for the first time overdosed or developed opioid use disorder within the next 12 months.

The conflicting advice can be confusing to both parents and providers.

“Parents see stories about overdoses in the news and are afraid for their children, while physicians and prescribers are also worried because they don’t know what the evidence is,” says Dyson. “Health-care providers don’t want to cause harm, and at the same time, they still want to be able to treat pain appropriately.”

Dyson and her team at the University of Alberta have developed a series of infographics to help physicians, parents and young people recognize that opioid pain relievers are sometimes needed.

One such graphic plainly states: “Opioids don’t have to be scary!”

“While we can’t say for sure that a short-term prescription for pain is linked with misuse, there is some evidence that that could happen,” she explained. “There is likely some risk, but it needs to be balanced with the harms of stigmatizing opioid use and under-treating pain, which comes with its own significant short- and long-term consequences.”