No association between opioids, breast cancer recurrence

the Oncology Nurse Advisor take:

There is no clinically relevant evidence of an association between opioid prescriptions and breast cancer recurrence, a new study published online ahead of print in the journal Cancer has shown.

Because opioids may affect immune function, researchers sought to determine whether postdiagnosis opioid use is associated with breast cancer recurrence. For the retrospective analysis, researchers identified 34,188 patients with incident, early stage breast cancer who were diagnosed between 1996 and 2008 in Denmark.

Results showed that there was no association between ever-use of opioids and breast cancer recurrence. When researchers adjusted for opioid type, strength, duration of use, and cumulative dose, there was still no association.

Researchers found that breast cancer recurrence rates were lower among users of strongly immunosuppressive opioids, but they note that bias could have been a contributing factor.

The findings suggest that opioids, which are frequently use to manage painassociated with comorbid conditions during cancer survivorship, do not increase the risk for developing breast cancer recurrence.