Modeling opioid use disorder in hand surgery patients

From 1999 to 2022, nearly 300,000 people died from overdoses involving prescription opioids. Commonly used for the management of acute post-surgical pain, prescription opioids remain a leading cause of opioid misuse and abuse. Among surgical populations, patients who undergo hand surgery have especially high rates of prolonged post-operative opioid use and opioid use disorder (OUD). We built a compartmental model describing the progression from opioid exposure to OUD in hand surgery patients and parameterized it using empirical patient data. Using this model, we investigated the functional relationship between the number of opioid prescriptions received and opioid abuse. We found that, depending on the response curve used to describe opioid addiction risk, different numbers of prescriptions pose higher risks than others, advancing our understanding of how prescription patterns influence OUD development.