Epidemiology of chronic pain and opioid use in primary care – a scoping review of big data research

Objective Recent research addressing the opioid use and misuse crisis in patients with chronic non-cancer pain in primary care has focused on traditional cohort studies underpinned by survey data. The advent of electronic health records creates a ‘big data’ opportunity for improving our understanding of the epidemiology of chronic non-cancer pain in primary care and opioid use and misuse. This scoping review aimed to map the chronic non-cancer pain patient population in primary care using big data research, investigating the patient characteristics and opioid prescription patterns. Methods Searches of primary electronic databases and grey literature, including OVID, CINAHL, and Scopus, were performed from January 1, 2010 to December 2, 2022. The search strategy was restricted to the English language. Results A total of 1,057 records from databases and 515 records from grey literature were considered. Of these, only three articles met the eligibility criteria, and two articles of these reported an estimated chronic pain prevalence of 3.82% and 10.3% in the primary care setting. Chronic pain patients that presented to primary care providers were predominately female, and common comorbidities were anxiety and depression. An estimated 30% of chronic pain patients used opioids for treatment sourced from general practitioners and family practitioners. Conclusion The use of big data remains underutilized for investigating the epidemiology of chronic pain and opioid use in primary care. This review calls for a greater focus on pain informatics with big data to improve the accuracy of future clinical chronic pain epidemiology studies. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Clinical Protocols ### Funding Statement Funding sources No funding was allocated for the conduct of this research study. J Lin acknowledges the internship funding from Digital Health CRC Australia. A P Wang acknowledges the funding support for her Westmead Early Career Fellowship from Research Education Network, Westmead Health Precinct. ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes All data produced are available online at