Opioid Use clinical trials at University of California Health

Patients with chronic pain who use opioids appear to be at increased risk for breathing issues during sleep, termed sleep disordered breathing (SDB). Treatment of SDB often consists of use of a device during sleep that provides continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) via a mask interface. However, this device is not effective or tolerated in all individuals. The goal of this study is to examine whether a medication called acetazolamide can improve SDB, as an alternative to CPAP treatment. The investigators will measure the improvement in SDB, as well as any change in symptoms, during a 1 week treatment with acetazolamide compared with 1 week of placebo (sugar pill). This study will help to provide data for longer term studies of treatment for SDB in patients who use opioids.

The primary goal of this proposal is to validate a novel genomic and microbiome predictive model that may be used to assess a person's risk of developing opioid use disorder (OUD). The following will be tested: (1) MODUS (Measuring risk for Opioid use Disorder Using SNPs), which is a genomic panel consisting of a set number of proven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) that utilizes machine learning to determine an individual's risk; and (2) MICROUD (MICRObiome for Opioid Use Disorder), which will be a novel microbiome prediction panel for OUD risk. MODUS and MICROUD will be developed using existing public datasets with genomic and microbiome data (e.g., All of Us, Human Microbiome Project). During development of these predictive models, in parallel, an external prospective validation cohort will be recruited consisting of subjects from the University of California, San Diego, Veteran Affairs of San Diego, and Veteran Affairs of Palo Alto (each site with separate IRB). The hypothesis is that MODUS and MICROUD will have high predictive potential for identifying high risk patients for OUD.

Personalized medicine is a concept in which medical care is individualized to a patient based on their unique characteristics, including comorbidities, demographics, genetics, and microbiome. After major surgery, some patients are at increased risk of opioid dependence. By identifying unique genetic and microbiome markers, clinicians may potentially identify individual risk factors for opioid dependence. By identifying these high risk patients early-on, personalized interventions may be applied to these patients in order to reduce the incidence of opioid-dependence.

Breast surgery, which includes mastectomy, breast reconstructive surgery, or lumpectomies with sentinel node biopsies, may lead to the development of chronic pain and long-term opioid use. In the era of an opioid crisis, it is important to risk-stratify this surgical population for risk of these outcomes in an effort to personalize pain management. The opioid epidemic in the United States resulted in more than 40,000 deaths in 2016, 40% of which involved prescription opioids. Furthermore, it is estimated that 2 million patients become opioid-dependent after elective, outpatient surgery each year. After major breast surgery, chronic pain has been reported to develop anywhere between 35% - 62% of patients, while about 10% use long-term opioids. Precision medicine is a concept at which medical management is tailored to an individual patient based on a specific patient's characteristics, including social, demographic, medical, genetic, and molecular/cellular data. With a plethora of data specific to millions of patients, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) modalities to analyze big data in order to implement precision medicine is crucial. We propose to prospectively collect rich data from patients undergoing various breast surgeries in order to develop predictive models using AI modalities to predict patients at-risk for chronic pain and opioid use.