Surmounting Withdrawal to Initiate Fast Treatment With Naltrexone

The overarching objective of the SWIFT trial (CTN-0097) is to foster widespread adoption of a regimen for rapid initiation of treatment with extended-release injection naltrexone (XR-NTX) at inpatient or residential Community Treatment Programs (CTPs). If widely adopted, such a regimen would have a substantial public health impact by expanding medication treatment options offered to patients with OUD to include XR-NTX. In multi-site, randomized (subject level) trials, XR-NTX, once initiated, has been found to have similar effectiveness to sublingual buprenorphine on clinical outcomes of retention in treatment and abstinence from opioids. However, initiation of naltrexone often involves a significant (up to 2 weeks) delay, which is a clinical hurdle that impedes the widespread adoption of XR-NTX as a treatment option. Initiation of naltrexone in patients actively using opioids requires that a patient be detoxified first, and the official prescribing information for XR-NTX recommends an additional 7- to 10-day waiting period after last dose of opioid before administering XR-NTX. This standard initiation regimen, involving a brief period of agonist, usually buprenorphine, taper followed by a 7- to 10-day waiting period, takes approximately two weeks. During this time, patients are vulnerable to drop out and relapse; further, this waiting period is problematic in the face of funding restrictions on the duration of inpatient stays. In a single-site randomized trial, a Rapid naltrexone induction method utilizing minimal buprenorphine, non-opioid medications to treat withdrawal symptoms, and upward titration of oral naltrexone starting with small doses, XR-NTX initiation was accomplished in 5 to 7 days and was found superior to the standard 14-day approach on the proportion of patients initiating XR-NTX. The primary goal of this hybrid effectiveness-implementation study is to determine whether the Rapid method of initiating treatment with XR-NTX is non-inferior to a standard method on the primary effectiveness outcome of successful initiation of XR-NTX (receiving the first injection) when implemented at community-based inpatient or residential programs. Secondary objectives include comparing rapid versus standard method of XR-NTX initiation on: time from admission to first dose of XR-NTX and time to dropout, craving, withdrawal severity, retention, abstinence, and safety measures, as measured during the inpatient initiation process and the first two months post XR-NTX induction. Other exploratory outcomes include predictors of initiation success, and economic analyses. The implementation goal is to operationalize an implementation facilitation strategy that will be used to train clinical sites on the XR-NTX initiation method, to capture fidelity to the rapid induction process, and to study barriers and facilitators to implementation and refine the implementation facilitation strategy accordingly.