People Who Use Opioids Are More Likely to Use a Sedative-Hypnotic Medication, Study Finds

Opioid use is associated with using a sedative-hypnotic medication, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

“In this analysis of nationally representative data, individuals who used or misused an opioid in the past year had greater odds of also using a sedative-hypnotic, even after adjusting for sociodemographic and clinical covariates,” wrote Andrew Tubbs, BSc, Sleep and Health Research Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Arizona College of Medicine–Tuscon in Tuscon, Arizona, and coauthors.

In a survey of 171,766 people, 24% used prescription opioids, with 3.6% misusing them. Those who used opioids had a higher likelihood of also using sedative benzodiazepines (odds ratio, 4.4; 95% CI, 3.61–5.4) and Z-drugs (odds ratio, 3.8; 95% CI, 3.51–4.09), especially those who misused them. The odds ratios among those who misused opioids were 7.5 for sedative benzodiazepine and 6.1 for a Z-drug. Machine learning models accurately identified sedative-hypnotic use in 80% of cases, an absolute 7% improvement over models without opioid data.

“In analyzing data from a nationally representative sample, persons who used opioids were at least 4-fold more likely to use a hypnotic than persons who did not use opioids, and adjusting for sociodemographic and clinical covariates did not eliminate this relationship,” wrote the study authors.

Reference

Tubbs AS, Ghani SB, Naps M, Grandner MA, Stein MD, Chakravorty S. Past-year use or misuse of an opioid is associated with use of a sedative-hypnotic medication: a US National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) study. J Clin Sleep Med. 2022;18(3):809-816. doi:10.5664/jcsm.9724