The association between outpatient buprenorphine detoxification duration and clinical treatment outcomes: A review

The data reviewed here suggest taper duration is associated with opioid abstinence achieved during detoxification but not with other markers of treatment outcome. The reviewed studies varied widely on several parameters (e.g., frequency of urinalysis testing, provision of ancillary medications) that may influence treatment outcome and thus could have interfered with the ability to identify relationships between taper duration and outcomes. Future studies evaluating opioid detoxification should utilize rigorous experimental methods and report a wider range of outcome measures in order to help advance our understanding of the association between taper duration and treatment outcomes.