Bowel Dysfunction in Opiate Substitution Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Chronic use of opioids is clinically known to be often associated with bowel dysfunction, most often with constipation.Objective: We examined the correlates of bowel dysfunction in methadone and suboxone patients.Methodology: 68 patients (mean age 40.3, SD=9.5; 40 men, 28 women) participated.The average number of years using opiates prior to treatment was 6.9 (SD=7.2) and the average number of years in the substitution treatment was 7.2 (SD=3.1).Seventeen were on suboxone (mean dose 14.7 mg, SD=8.6) and 51 on methadone (mean dose 70.4 mg, SD=29.6).All responded to a survey questionnaire about frequencies of 8 types of bowel dysfunction: constipation, nausea, emesis, abdominal pain, loss of appetite, heartburn, acid reflux, and intestinal bloating.For each of these 8 symptoms, the response categories were: never=0, only rarely=1, sometimes=2, often=3, very often=4, and always=5.Results: When categories "very often" and "always" were pooled, the frequencies of bowel dysfunction were as follows: constipation (42.6%), nausea (7.4%), emesis (2.9%), abdominal pain (10.3%), loss of appetite (14.7%), heartburn (10.3%), acid reflux (7.5%), and abdominal bloating (14.7%).A higher dose of methadone was significantly (p<.05, 1-tailed) correlated with acid reflux (r=.47), bloating (r=.37), constipation (r=.36), abdominal pain (r=.29), and heartburn (r=.31).A higher dose of suboxone was significantly (p<.05, 1-tailed) correlated with more frequent nausea (r=.47) and emesis (r=.42).Years of opiate use were unrelated to bowel dysfunction. Discussion and Conclusions:The majority of patients (57.4%) reported that at least one of the 8 bowel dysfunction symptoms occurs "very often" or "always."Constipation was by far the most frequent symptom.The bowel dysfunction was more frequent in patients with higher methadone or suboxone doses.Only 5.9% of patients indicated that they "never" experience any of the 8 bowel symptoms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".