The Effect of Chronic Pain on Delay Discounting in Methadone Patients
Status:
Recruiting
Trial end date:
2023-12-31
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
The epidemic of opioid overdose deaths continues to rise, killing more persons in 2017 than
HIV/AIDS at the height of that epidemic. Medication assisted treatment, including methadone
and buprenorphine, is the standard of care for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD).
However, chronic pain can reduce treatment efficacy during medication assisted treatment and
is associated with illicit substance relapse, dropout, and subsequent overdose. Mechanisms by
which chronic pain may influence the impulsive decision making (e.g., drug relapse) in
persons with OUD have not been well characterized. A better understanding is needed of
decision-making in this population. Two factors that can influence decisions to use drugs are
impulsivity and acute opioid withdrawal. This proposal will test how chronic pain is
associated with increases in impulsive decision making in OUD, whether impulsive decision
making is greater when undergoing opioid withdrawal, and how catastrophizing may modify the
association between withdrawal and impulsive decision making in patients with chronic pain
and OUD. An ideal population for this developmental research project are methadone maintained
patients, who show high treatment attendance rates and will therefore assure study efficiency
and reliable completion.