An adverse-event database study identified benzodiazepines among concomitant drugs in opioid reports. Reporting frequency did not establish exposure prevalence or a causal interaction rate.
The signal analysis
The researchers examined European and US spontaneous-report databases for selected prescription opioids and abuse-, dependence-, and withdrawal-related terms. They calculated several disproportionality measures.
Benzodiazepines appeared among commonly reported concomitant medicines, alongside antidepressants, other opioids, antihistamines, alcohol, and other substances. Different opioids showed different reporting patterns.
Signals require their denominator
Spontaneous reports are affected by underreporting, selective reporting, missing information, and changing attention to particular drugs. The number of exposed people is not supplied by report counts.
A disproportionality signal is therefore different from an incidence rate or proof that a drug combination caused a reported event. For an individual case, establish actual exposure, temporal overlap, clinical findings, and competing explanations. This paper supports surveillance and hypothesis generation; it cannot assign a percentage probability that benzodiazepine co-use caused an individual overdose.
Source paper
Original analysis of the supplied journal article, identified as PMC9231103.
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