Taking some opioid painkillers increases the risk of deadly infections, according to an analysis of data from TennCare, Tennessee’s state Medicaid program.

Opioid users run a risk for meningitis and pneumonia about 60 percent higher than that of non-opioid users, according to the research by a team at Vanderbilt University.

Certain opioids are known to have immunosuppressive properties, but the research team found an association for both pneumonia and non-pneumonia invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD), “which indicated that the association cannot be fully attributed to opioid-related respiratory depression and aspiration,” according to the team’s lead author Andrew Wiese, a postdoctoral research fellow at Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine.