The Dyadic Association Between Patient Overdose Risk and Family Attitudes Toward Medications for Opioid Use Disorder.

Objectives: Strong social support is beneficial in the care of patients with opioid use disorder. While medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) are the gold standard treatment for OUD, the beliefs of support persons (SP; family, friend, partner of the individual) about MOUD can influence whether a person initiates and adheres to MOUD.

Methods: We examined dyadic baseline data (n=219) of patients receiving buprenorphine treatment and their identified SP across five community health clinics in California. We evaluated SP attitudes about and familiarity with MOUD using 5 items and patient risk via sum scores on an opioid overdose risk assessment scale. We conducted multiple linear regression models using opioid overdose risk score as the outcome and SP attitudes as predictors, controlling for SP age, sex, and race as covariates.

Results: The majority of SPs (80%) reported being at least somewhat familiar with MOUD, which was associated with patients who had lower opioid overdose risk scores. SPs who reported agreement with the belief statement that people should be able to stop their opioid use on their own without medication were associated with patients with higher opioid overdose risk scores (P=0.048). When adjusting for covariates, only increased familiarity with MOUD and lower patient overdose risk remained significant (P=0.028).

Conclusions: Efforts that aim to promote familiarity with and decrease stigmatizing attitudes toward MOUD may be beneficial in both building support in the patient-SP relationship and potentially reducing overdose risk among patients with OUD.