MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4416011884 · doi:10.1371/journal.pmen.0000442

Patient and Prescriber characteristics associated with return to daily-dispense methadone: A multilevel cohort study

2025· article· en· W4416011884 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Ria Garg, Shaleesa Ledlie, Daniel McCormack, Nikki Bozinoff, Jennifer Wyman, Beth Sproule, Pamela Leece, Mina Tadrous, Ashley Smoke, Charlotte Munro, Tara Gomes

Bibliographic record

VenuePLOS mental health. · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicOpioid Use Disorder Treatment
Canadian institutionsOntario Drug Policy Research NetworkPublic Health OntarioCentre for Addiction and Mental HealthInstitute for Clinical Evaluative SciencesWomen's College HospitalUniversity of TorontoSt. Michael's Hospital
FundersCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchOntario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care
KeywordsMethadoneHazard ratioConfidence intervalCohort studyCohortOpioidEmergency department

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Early in the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, modified clinical guidance recommended the provision of take-home methadone doses for those previously ineligible to facilitate social distancing. Following this change, studies reported improved treatment retention among patients granted expanded access to take-home doses. However, most patients resumed daily dispensed methadone within six months. Factors associated with the return to daily dispensed methadone remain unknown. Therefore, we conducted a population-based cohort study to identify patient and prescriber-related characteristics associated with return to daily dispensed methadone. Our study included all residents of Ontario, Canada who received daily dispensed methadone on March 21, 2020, and were then provided at least one take-home dose between March 22, 2020, and April 21, 2020. Follow-up time was divided into 14-day discrete time intervals. The primary outcome was return to daily dispensed methadone, defined as the first interval where a take-home dose was not dispensed. A multilevel discrete time survival model with a complementary log-log link function and random intercepts across prescribers to account for patient clustering by prescriber was used to approximate cause-specific hazard ratios. Within 26 weeks, 1,675 (58.5%) individuals were reverted to daily dispensed methadone. Person-level variables significantly associated with our primary outcome included occurrence of an emergency department visit during or before the interval of interest (HR = 1.27; 95% CI = 1.05, 1.55) and missed methadone dose(s) in the interval prior (HR = 1.59; 95% CI = 1.44, 1.76). Lastly, patients prescribed methadone by a high-volume (top 20th percentile) opioid agonist treatment prescriber had an increased hazard of return to daily dispensed methadone compared to those prescribed methadone by a low-volume (50th percentile) prescriber (HR = 1.44; 95% CI = 1.14, 1.83). While patient characteristics that may indicate clinical instability, such as recent history of missed methadone dose(s) were associated with return to daily dispensed methadone, prescriber OAT client volume was also be associated this outcome.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.827

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.297
Teacher spread0.280 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venuePLOS mental health.Same topicOpioid Use Disorder TreatmentFrench-language works237,207