Epidemiology of chronic pain and opioid use in primary care - a scoping review of big data research

ObjectiveRecent research addressing the opioid use and misuse crisis in patients with chronic non-cancer pain in primary care has focused on traditional cohort studies underpinned by survey data. The advent of electronic health records creates a big data opportunity for improving our understanding of the epidemiology of chronic non-cancer pain in primary care and opioid use and misuse. This scoping review aimed to map the chronic non-cancer pain patient population in primary care using big data research, investigating the patient characteristics and opioid prescription patterns. MethodsSearches of primary electronic databases and grey literature, including OVID, CINAHL, and Scopus, were performed from January 1, 2010 to December 2, 2022. The search strategy was restricted to the English language. ResultsA total of 1,057 records from databases and 515 records from grey literature were considered. Of these, only three articles met the eligibility criteria, and two articles of these reported an estimated chronic pain prevalence of 3.82% and 10.3% in the primary care setting. Chronic pain patients that presented to primary care providers were predominately female, and common comorbidities were anxiety and depression. An estimated 30% of chronic pain patients used opioids for treatment sourced from general practitioners and family practitioners. ConclusionThe use of big data remains underutilized for investigating the epidemiology of chronic pain and opioid use in primary care. This review calls for a greater focus on pain informatics with big data to improve the accuracy of future clinical chronic pain epidemiology studies.