Association between prescribed stimulant medications and overdose among individuals receiving opioid agonist therapy: A retrospective cohort study from British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: We measured the association between prescribed stimulant medications and overdose among individuals receiving opioid agonist therapy (OAT) for opioid use disorder. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study using the British Columbia Provincial Overdose Cohort, a linked administrative database. SETTING: We used data from British Columbia, Canada, from January 2015 through February 2020. PARTICIPANTS: In total, 9395 individuals contributed 18 273 person-years of follow-up while dispensed OAT. MEASUREMENTS: We examined the association between stimulant prescription (primary exposure) and fatal or non-fatal overdose (primary outcome, allowing for recurrent events) after adjusting for potential confounders including sociodemographic characteristics and substance use patterns. As a secondary analysis, we evaluated type of OAT (full agonists involving methadone or slow-release oral morphine versus partial agonist involving buprenorphine/naloxone alone) as a potential effect modifier. FINDINGS: There were 1746 overdose events; 37 (2.1%) were fatal. Overall, there was no increased risk of overdose among individuals dispensed a stimulant medication while on OAT [adjusted Cox regression hazard ratio (AHR) = 1.13, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) = 0.86-1.49, P = 0.39]. When analyzed by type of OAT medication, for individuals on buprenorphine, dispensation of a stimulant medication was associated with a reduced risk of overdose (AHR = 0.47, 95% CI = 0.23-0.96, P = 0.037) while, for individuals on full agonist OAT, dispensation of a stimulant medication was associated with an increased risk of overdose (AHR = 1.51, 95% CI = 1.09-2.07, P = 0.012). CONCLUSIONS: There does not appear to be an overall increased risk of overdose for individuals co-prescribed a stimulant medication with opioid agonist therapy (OAT). There appears to be a reduced risk of overdose for individuals dispensed buprenorphine with a stimulant medication compared with those dispensed buprenorphine alone, and an increased risk of overdose for individuals dispensed full agonist OAT (methadone or slow-release oral morphine) with a stimulant medication compared with those dispensed full agonist OAT alone.
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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".