SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A new study conducted by University of California San Francisco researchers found buprenorphine works for treating opioid use disorder, but a new micro-dosing technique was far less effective than hoped.
During the COVID pandemic, when fentanyl overdose deaths surged in San Francisco and across the U.S., doctors were desperate to find ways of helping their patients battling addiction, a UCSF spokesperson said.
Buprenorphine works by only partly binding to the receptor that creates the fentanyl “high” without the level of euphoria of stronger opioids. Patients who are still using fentanyl and are treated with buprenorphine suffered from severe withdrawal symptoms.
For the study, doctors started giving patients in San Francisco small doses over a series of days to slowly build up the drug in their systems. This treatment technique is also called the microdosing approach, or low-dose initiation. Of 126 participants, just 34% were able to work up to a full dose of buprenorphine.
Leslie Suen, the study’s author, said she was disappointed by the results, but the findings still need to be shared publicly.
“This doesn’t seem like it’s working the way we had hoped,” said Suen, an assistant professor at the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine and an addiction medicine specialist. “When people expect it to work, and it doesn’t work for them, they feel like there’s something wrong with them.”
The study was published Friday in JAMA Network Open titled “Outpatient Low-Dose Initiation of Buprenorphine for People Using Fentanyl.”
The study’s participants were treated at two outpatient substance use disorder clinics in San Francisco between May 2021 and November 2022. They opted either for seven days of taking low doses of buprenorphine before getting up to an optimal dose (dosing two or three times a day), or four days of treatment (dosing four times a day).
Doctors had hoped that slowly introducing the buprenorphine would help reduce the discomfort of detox, and people could stop using fentanyl when they felt ready.
At follow-up visits, 38% of those with the four-day regimen achieved successful buprenorphine initiation and 28% were successful on the seven-day protocol, for an overall success rate of 34%. Twenty-two percent stayed on the drug for at least 28 days.
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A new study conducted by University of California San Francisco researchers found buprenorphine works for treating opioid use disorder, but a new micro-dosing technique was far less effective than hoped. During the COVID pandemic, when fentanyl overdose deaths surged in San Francisco and across the U.S., doctors were desperate to find […]
Leave a Reply