We are grateful to Drs. Patel and Al-Shehab for their insightful response1 and Dr. Chelly’s thoughtful commentary2 regarding our recent publication on the multicenter study of prolonged opioid use and pain outcome after surgery.3 We appreciate their thoughtful and constructive critique and welcome this opportunity to address the issues they have raised.
Dr. Patel et al.’s first concern pertains to the variety of surgical interventions involved in our study, which they point out may cast doubts on the validity of our findings. They suggest subgroup analyses to help clarify the correlation between the type of surgical intervention and persistent opioid use. We would like to point out that we have indeed factored in the type of surgery within our logistic multivariate models. No identifiable association was found between the surgery type and opioid use at 3 months postsurgery. This observation is further substantiated by the posterior...