Pain-related Prescribing Patterns and Associated Factor in Breast Cancer Patients

ABSTRACT

Background@#With an increase in the number of breast cancer survivors, greater importance is attached to health-related quality of life, particularly pain and symptom control. This study aimed to identify the factors that are associated with pain in cancer patients based on the patterns of prescribing opioid, non-opioid, and adjuvant analgesics. @*Methods@#This analysis included new patients who had developed breast cancer between 2003 and 2012. The degree of pain was analyzed based on the socio-demographic (age, income quintile, number of hospitalizations, and duration of disease), indicator (Body Mass Index; BMI, Charlson Comorbidity Index; CCI, Cumulative Analgesic Consumption Score; CACS), operation (mastectomy, lymph node dissection), and therapy (chemotherapy, radiation therapy), as well as complication-related variable (lymphedema). @*Results@#As for the patterns of prescribing analgesics by stages, non-opioid and opioid analgesics constituted 30.7 and 69.3%, respectively. The mean value and variance of CACS were 5.596 and 12.567, respectively. The factors that significantly affected the degree of pain were age (≥50; IRR 1.848, 95% CI 1.564-2.184, p=0.000), income quintile (IRR 0.964, 95% CI 0.938-0.991, p=0.008), BMI (≥ 25; IRR 1.479, 95% CI 1.222-1.795, p= 0.000), CCI (≥ 4; IRR 1.649, 95% CI 1.344-2.036, p=0.000), and lymphedema (yes; IRR 1.267, 95% CI 1.006-1.610, p=0.047). @*Conclusions@#It is necessary to develop systematic and comprehensive pain control measures to improve the quality of life for breast cancer survivors, especially for those who are 50 years or older, lie in the lower-income quintile, have BMI of ≥25 and CCI score ≥ 4, or have lymphedema.