← Issue №14/ week of Oct 4, 2026/IBD

Chronic opioid use and the risk of infections and death in patients with inflammatory bowel disease: a nationwide cohort study based on real-world data.

From GI Signals issue №14: what this paper found, what it changes, and where it sits against the current standard of care, reviewed by Simon Mathews, MD.

IBD prospective cohort · n=51,844 · Oct 1, 2026 · Inflamm Bowel Dis · IF 4.5

Chronic opioid use and the risk of infections and death in patients with inflammatory bowel disease: a nationwide cohort study based on real-world data.

New evidenceCrohn's diseaseulcerative colitisepidemiologyhealth services
Clinical takeawayAvoid chronic opioid use in adult IBD patients when possible, as it is associated with significantly higher risks of infections and mortality, regardless of opioid strength.
What it foundChronic opioid use (≥3 prescriptions/year) in adult IBD patients increased hospital-diagnosed infections (aHR 1.91-1.93), antibiotic prescriptions (aHR 1.47-1.56), and mortality (aHR 1.74-1.76) compared to non-users.
ContextConfirms prior concerns about opioid risks in IBD, extending evidence to a nationwide cohort with robust adjustment for confounders. Both strong and weak opioids were associated with these adverse outcomes.
No standard claimed for this paper

Every paper is compared to the standard governing its question. This one is not: either no standard in the corpus matches it, or the comparison did not hold up on review and was withdrawn rather than published unverified. Both are logged.

Nørgård BM … Nielsen J · Inflammatory Bowel Diseases · IF 4.5 · PubMed ↗Permalink
← Read the whole of issue №14 Every paper GI Signals surfaces gets a page like this one. All issues