Ahead of this weekend's Super Bowl, some good news for the athletes: NFL players are largely avoiding opioid-based pain relievers when injuries strike.
A new study of data from the 2021 and 2022 seasons finds the National Football League's efforts to curb addictive opioid use is working, with the drugs comprising less than 3% of all pain meds prescribed.
"Moreover, only 10 percent of NFL athletes received even a single prescription for an opioid during a one-year period," noted study co-author Dr. Kurt Kroenke, a researcher-clinician at the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine, in Indianapolis.
"I think there's been much greater attention to what can be done in the training room for NFL athletes for their injuries and pain that doesn't rely on medicines," he added.
Many Americans fall prey to opioid misuse and addiction when they are prescribed the drugs to ease pain from injury or another cause.
Even the toughest athletes can be vulnerable.
“Professional football is a very physical sport," Kroenke said in a Regenstrief news release. "But anyone who watches professional hockey or NBA basketball or big league soccer and even college and high school sports, realizes how these players also are prone to injuries and pain."
When it comes to pro football players, he added, "there’s always been a concern from a safety and health perspective about what are they using to treat their pain."
Indeed, one 2011 survey of retired NFL players found more than half (52%) said they'd used an opioid painkiller during their career. Among that group, 71% reported they'd misused the drugs.
In response to the problem, in 2019 the NFL and the National Football League-National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) worked together to create a prescription drug monitoring program to help curb opioid painkiller use among players.
The first robust data resulting from that effort were available for 2021 and 2022.
The new study looked at which drugs were involved in 14,903 prescriptions for pain medications used by 2,207 NFL players in the 2021 season, and 14,880 prescriptions for 2,189 players during the 2022 season.
Less than 3% of all prescriptions involved opioids, the study found, and more than 90% of players never received an opioid for their pain.
Instead, players were typically given non-opioid meds such as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen, naproxen, diclofenac or celecoxib. That's in line with recent guidelines on pain management from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Kroenke is also a consultant to the NFL-NFLPA's Joint Pain Management Committee. He believes that the trend away from opioids isn't restricted to the NFL.
“I think how we treat pain safely, using opioid pain medications very infrequently, applies across all sports," he said.
The findings were published recently in the journal Current Sports Medicine Reports.