SOURCES:

Joseph Puglisi, Las Vegas.

National Institute on Drug Abuse: “Substance Use in Older Adults DrugFacts.”

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine: “Disparities by Sex and Race and Ethnicity in Death Rates Due to Opioid Overdose Among Adults 55 Years or Older, 1999 to 2019,” “Older adult opioid death rates on the rise.”

Gary Kennedy, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences on the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY.

Lewei Allison Lin, MD, assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Addiction Center.

National Institute on Drug Abuse Data: “Benzodiazepines and Opioids.”

Susan W. Lehmann, MD, director, Geriatric Psychiatry Day Hospital Program, John Hopkins, Baltimore.

CAMH: “Buprenorphine.”

McMaster University: “Problematic Opioid Use Among Older Adults: Epidemiology, Adverse Outcomes, and Treatment Considerations.”

MINT: “Understanding Motivational Interviewing.”

The post The Senior Citizen Opioid Epidemic appeared first on Healthy and Slim Life.

THURSDAY, Aug. 11, 2022 (HealthDay News) — The United States has an opioid epidemic, however there’s one brilliant spot within the battle in opposition to it: Prescriptions for these addictive medication have declined for sufferers with personal insurance coverage.

Amid pointers over the previous decade from governments, well being methods and insurers aimed toward lowering opioid prescriptions, earlier research have pointed to a nationwide drop in prescribing charges.

Patients who’re actively receiving most cancers therapies are excluded from these limits.

The new examine included most cancers sufferers in addition to individuals with different persistent ache. It discovered that total prescribing charges nonetheless dropped.

“We discover that from 2012 to 2019 there have been declines in opioid prescribing for people with persistent non-cancer ache and people with most cancers with out corresponding will increase in receipt of non-opioid therapies,” authors Sachini Bandara and Emma McGinty of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and Dr. Mark Bicket of the University of Michigan, wrote.

The examine was printed Aug. 10 in PLOS ONE .

“These findings spotlight the necessity to higher perceive how declines in prescribing are influencing the administration of ache amongst these affected person populations, significantly because the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] is at the moment updating opioid prescribing pointers for persistent ache,” the authors mentioned in a journal information launch.

For the examine, the researchers analyzed insurance coverage claims from 100 personal corporations. They checked out sufferers with most cancers and people with different forms of ache, together with low again ache, neuropathic ache, complications or arthritis.

Between 2012 and 2019, the share of people that had been prescribed an opioid for cancer-related ache dropped from 86% to 78.7%, the examine discovered. Those who acquired opioid prescriptions for different forms of ache dropped from 49.7% to 30.5%.

While charges of non-opioid ache treatment had been regular for individuals with non-cancer ache, researchers discovered they rose for most cancers sufferers from 74.4% to 78.8%.

For those that nonetheless acquired opioids, fewer individuals acquired extraordinarily excessive doses or greater than a one-week provide, the researchers reported.

They mentioned extra examine is required to find out how the revised pointers influenced ache administration in each teams.

More data

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has extra on the opioid epidemic.

SOURCE: PLOS ONE, information launch, Aug. 10, 2022

The post U.S. Opioid Prescriptions Are Declining appeared first on Healthy and Slim Life.

FRIDAY, July 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Experts predict opioid overdoses will climb in each rural and concrete areas due to the deadly follow of blending the extremely addictive narcotics with different medicine.

The coming wave of opioid overdoses “will be worse than ever seen before,” mentioned researchers from Northwestern Medicine in Chicago who studied tendencies and used a predictive mannequin to find out the place deaths would escalate.

“I’m sounding the alarm because, for the first time, there is a convergence and escalation of acceleration rates for every type of rural and urban county,” mentioned corresponding writer Lori Post. She is director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“Not only is the death rate from an opioid at an all-time high, but the acceleration of that death rate signals explosive exponential growth that is even larger than an already historic high,” Post mentioned in a Northwestern information launch.

For the research, the researchers used knowledge from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database for 3,147 counties and areas equal to counties to check geographic tendencies in opioid deaths between 1999 and 2020.

The workforce was attempting to find out if geography was concerned up to now waves and to theorize about any coming wave.

The research discovered that opioid overdose deaths in 2020 had been escalating sooner in rural areas than in cities. Between 2019 and 2020, charges of overdose deaths escalated for the primary time in six sorts of rural and concrete counties, Post mentioned.

“We have the highest escalation rate for the first time in America, and this fourth wave will be worse than it’s ever been before,” Post defined. “It’s going to mean mass death.”

The analysis workforce examined toxicology experiences and located that individuals are utilizing fentanyl (an artificial opioid that’s 50 to 100 occasions stronger than morphine) and carfentanil (an artificial opioid roughly 100 occasions stronger than fentanyl) together with methamphetamines and cocaine.

This deadly cocktail could make it tougher to save lots of somebody experiencing an overdose with an overdose-reversing drug like naloxone.

“The stronger the drugs, the harder it is to revive a person,” defined research co-author Alexander Lundberg, assistant professor of emergency drugs at Feinberg. “The polysubstance use complicates an already dire situation.”

Post mentioned, “It appears that those who have died from opioid overdoses had been playing pharmacist and trying to manage their own dosing. This is a bigger problem because you have people misusing cocaine and methamphetamines along with an opioid, so you have to treat two things at once, and the fentanyl is horribly volatile.”

The research authors mentioned options would possibly embrace methadone facilities, which supply medication-assisted anti-addiction therapies. These are extra frequent in city areas. Rural areas don’t have any medication-assisted therapy choices, Post mentioned, including that what works in giant cities is probably going not as helpful for rural areas.

“Nobody wants to be a drug addict. It doesn’t matter if you’re taking Percocet because you broke your back while mining or if you’re a high schooler who died because they got into grandma’s medicine cabinet. We need to look at opioid addiction and overdose prevention immediately,” Post mentioned.

“The only path forward is to increase awareness to prevent opioid use disorders and to provide medication-assisted treatment that is culturally appropriate and non-stigmatizing in rural communities,” she added.

The findings had been printed on-line July 28 in JAMA Network Open .

More data

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has extra on the opioid epidemic.

SOURCE: Northwestern Medicine, information launch, July 28, 2022

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SOURCES:

Addiction: “Rate of Detoxification Service Use and its Impact Among a Cohort of Supervised Injecting Facility Users.”

American Addiction Centers: “Suboxone Withdrawal: Symptoms, Timeline & Detox Treatment.”

Caleb Blaschke, Sioux Falls, SD.

Canadian Mental Health Association: “Harm Reduction.”

City of New York: “Overdose Prevention Centers Averted 59 Overdoses in First Three Weeks of Operation.”

Cleveland Clinic: “Is Naloxone (Narcan) Sold Over-the-Counter?”

Consumer Federation of America: “Traditional Savings Accounts: Are They Still Popular?”

Drug and Alcohol Dependence: “Socioeconomic Marginalization and Opioid-Related Overdose: A Systematic Review,” “Supervised Injection Services: What Has Been Demonstrated? A Systematic Literature Review.”

Eric R., Find Addiction Rehabs, Boca Raton, FL.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation: “How America Banks: Household Use of Banking and Financial Services.”

FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University: “From the War on Drugs to Harm Reduction: Imagining a Just Overdose Crisis Response.”

Harm Reduction Journal: “Harm Reduction in the USA: The Research Perspective and an Archive to David Purchase.”

Health & Justice: “Pre-Arrest Diversion to Addiction Treatment by Law Enforcement: Protocol for the Community-Level Policing Initiative to Reduce Addiction-Related Harm, Including Crime.”

Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health: “5 Things to Know About Overdose Prevention Sites.”

International Journal of Drug Policy: “Barriers to Naloxone Use and Acceptance among Opioid Users, First Responders, and Emergency Department Providers in New Hampshire, USA.”

Journal of Addictive Disease: “Stigma from the Viewpoint of the Patient.”

Journal of Behavioral Health Services & Research: “Provider Views of Harm Reduction Versus Abstinence Policies Within Homeless Services for Dually Diagnosed Adults.”

Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved: “The Data Dilemma in Family Homelessness.”

The Lancet: “Reduction in Overdose Mortality after the Opening of North America’s First Medically Supervised Safer Injecting Facility: A Retrospective Population-Based Study.”

Letter signed by 14 U.S. Senators opposing supervised injections websites, despatched to President Joseph R. Biden, Feb. 15, 2022.

NBC New York: “I-Team: Father Faults Judge for Son’s Heroin Overdose.”

The New York Times: “Nation’s First Supervised Drug-Injection Sites Open in New York.”

Social Science & Medicine: “Association between Homelessness and Opioid Overdose and Opioid-related Hospital Admissions/Emergency Department Visits.”

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA): “Harm Reduction,” “Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT),” “Naloxone.”

Washington State Department of Health: “Fentanyl Test Strip Project.”

The White House: “White House Releases Model Law to Help States Ensure Access to “Safe, Effective, and Cost-Saving” Syringe Services Programs.”

University of Southern California Department of Nursing: “Supervised Injection Sites are Coming to the United States: Here’s What You Should Know.”

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “Medication-Assisted Treatment for Opioid Addiction.”

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: “Homelessness Increasing Even Prior to COVID-19 Pandemic.”

U.S. Government Accountability Office: “Drug Misuse: Most States Have Good Samaritan Laws and Research Indicates They May Have Positive Effects.”

The post Opioid Addiction Harm Reduction: What to Know appeared first on Healthy and Slim Life.

MONDAY, June 6, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Here’s a easy weapon to make use of in opposition to the opioid epidemic: New analysis finds that inserting cut-off dates on prescriptions for extremely addictive narcotic painkillers could cut back the chance of misuse.

In 2019, 1% of opioid prescriptions from U.S. dentists and surgeons had been stuffed greater than 30 days after being issued, lengthy after the acute ache meant to be handled by the prescriptions ought to have subsided, the University of Michigan analysis crew discovered.

Generalized to all surgical and opioid prescriptions within the United States, that proportion would translate into greater than 260,000 opioid prescriptions a 12 months which can be stuffed greater than a month after being written, based on the research printed on-line lately in JAMA Network Open .

“Our findings counsel that some sufferers use opioids from surgeons and dentists for a motive or throughout a time-frame apart from supposed by the prescriber,” stated lead research writer Dr. Kao-Ping Chua. He is a pediatrician and member of the college’s Child Health Evaluation and Research Center and Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.

“These are each types of prescription opioid misuse, which in flip is a robust threat issue for opioid overdose,” Chua defined in a college information launch.

State legal guidelines on expiration intervals for managed substance prescriptions could also be partly in charge, based on the researchers.

In 2019, 18 states permitted prescriptions for Schedule II opioids and different managed substances — these with the best threat of misuse — to be stuffed as much as six months after writing, and one other eight states allowed these medicine to be distributed as much as a 12 months after the prescription.

“It’s perplexing that states would permit managed substance prescriptions to be stuffed so lengthy after they’re written,” Chua stated.

Tighter state legal guidelines may assist forestall or cut back opioid abuse related to delayed filling of prescriptions, he advised.

The researchers pointed to Minnesota, which had a pointy drop in delayed allotting after it launched a regulation in July 2019 that prohibited opioid allotting greater than 30 days after a prescription was written.

Another possibility is for prescribers to incorporate directions on the prescription to not dispense opioids after a sure period of time, the research authors stated.

More info

There’s extra on prescription opioids on the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

SOURCE: University of Michigan, information launch, June 1, 2022

The post Setting Time Limits on Opioid Prescriptions Might Reduce Misuse appeared first on Healthy and Slim Life.

April 21, 2022 – Pandemic situations have been ripe for a psychological well being catastrophe: Isolation, a crashing financial system, and a thriller sickness taking intention with lethal accuracy. But whereas cases of despair and anxiousness elevated, there appeared to be one comforting prospect: In the previous 2 years, suicide numbers have dropped.

“We all thought that suicides would go up. It was a perfect storm: the lack of medical care, increased stress and bereavement. But when the numbers started coming in, they were actually decreasing,” says Paul Nestadt, MD, a psychiatrist with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Experts have been optimistic at first, pointing to plenty of potential drivers for the three% drop in suicides nationally. Though it might not appear logical, suicide charges are inclined to go down throughout occasions of disaster, says Nestadt, whose analysis focuses on suicide. Studies of suicides throughout World War II and simply after 9/11 discovered comparable decreases.

An overarching give attention to psychological well being in the course of the pandemic might also have performed a job. More folks have been searching for therapy throughout psychological well being crises, each in particular person and thru telehealth.

While Nestadt agrees that these items did play a job, he thinks the numbers is also deceptive. Suicides, he says, may very well be hidden by the nation’s opioid disaster.

Only 1 / 4 of those that die by suicide depart a word. And in the event that they’re discovered lifeless of an overdose, it’s laborious to know whether or not it was an accident or not, he says. Research has additionally proven that these with substance abuse issues usually tend to die by suicide than different teams.

“It could be that overdose deaths are going up and they’re hiding the number of suicides,” he says.

Ian Rockett, PhD, is an epidemiologist at West Virginia University. He says drug overdoses muddy the waters for health workers, who’re overworked and infrequently poorly funded.

His analysis, which was printed final yr in The Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine, discovered that suicides in Western states like Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming appeared larger than in different states due to using firearms. In distinction, in elements of the nation the place the opioid epidemic was raging, deaths ensuing from drug overdoses have been usually categorised by coroners as “undetermined,” seemingly lacking people who have been truly suicides. This artificially deflates nationwide numbers.

Like Nestadt, Rockett is skeptical that suicide deaths dropped in the course of the pandemic at the exact same time that overdose deaths have been up by 29% from 2020 to 2021.

Evidence wanted to substantiate an overdose suicide, like a word or different indicators of suicidal conduct, usually can’t be discovered when health workers are figuring out the reason for loss of life, says Rockett.

To higher doc instances, he’s been advocating using a technique often called “psychological autopsy,” which mixes an examination of medical and authorized information with in-depth interviews of household and mates of the deceased. The instrument was used successfully by the Los Angeles County coroner from the Fifties till the Nineteen Eighties to uncover plenty of barbiturate suicides however was later dropped due to price.

“If we’re really invested in obtaining high-quality suicide data, this can help,” he says.

Hilary S. Connery, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, says the information in sure elements of the nation with higher entry to psychological well being care and stronger gun management legal guidelines could present a discount. Research has proven that limiting entry to firearms reduces suicides.

But Connery isn’t satisfied that the information displays the true numbers. Health methods hit laborious by the pandemic have been already strained by drug deaths.

“These resources are lacking,” she says, “and in many parts of the country, cause-of-death investigations hardly happen at all.”

Suicides and drug overdoses can occur in clusters when folks develop into desensitized to loss of life, says Connery, who’s additionally the scientific director of McLean Hospital’s Division of Alcohol, Drugs and Addiction in Belmont, MA.

For instance, when somebody dies by suicide, it will increase the chance that their friends will do the identical factor due to publicity to it. This is very true when different members of the group are confronted with comparable stressors like battle, neighborhood violence, poverty, and exclusion.

Accurate real-time surveillance knowledge would assist determine folks in danger, Connery says.

“We need to stop working in silos, because suicides and overdoses are related issues with similar risk factors, and in many cases, prevention may need to be overlapping,” she says.

Jill Harkavy-Friedman, PhD, who leads the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s analysis grant program, believes the rise in overdose deaths is essentially as a consequence of fentanyl, a extremely poisonous substance that’s getting used to chop heroin and cocaine. She agrees {that a} portion of the 100,000 drug deaths in 2020 could have been intentional however says suicides seemingly did lower general as a consequence of elevated consideration to psychological well being.

“We encouraged people to seek help when they were in distress, and it seems like they were listening,” she says.

Harkavy-Friedman additionally notes that the numbers have been already happening in 2019, partially as a result of we’re extra open to having conversations about suicide, a topic that was as soon as off limits.

“We’re more open to discussing it in a way that makes people feel less alone,” she says.

For the teams which have entry to care, it appears to be working. Experts typically agree that there are extra instruments obtainable and a greater understanding of suicide at the moment than in occasions previous. Still, the information is probably not reflecting what’s actually happening in our society, says Connery.

“The whole nation is notified virtually instantly when romaine lettuce is contaminated with E. coli, for instance,” she says. “This same model could be used to prevent suicide. With similar real-time data, we could step in and stop at least some of these deaths.”

The undue stigma associated with both drug addiction and suicide is preventing people from getting the help they need, and it’s causing an unnecessary loss of life, says Connery. “In the end, whether it’s a suicide or an overdose, these people are still ending up dead, often at a very young age.”

If you or somebody you already know is contemplating suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), textual content “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741, or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

The post Is the Opioid Crisis Masking Real Rates of Suicides? appeared first on Healthy and Slim Life.

THURSDAY, Nov. 24, 2021 (HealthDay News) — CVS Health, Walmart and Walgreens contributed to opioid overdoses and deaths in two Ohio counties, a federal jury in Cleveland discovered Tuesday.

The first jury verdict in an opioids case got here within the carefully watched take a look at case and will show encouraging to plaintiffs in hundreds of lawsuits throughout the United States utilizing the identical authorized technique — that the businesses contributed to a “public nuisance,” The New York Times reported.

That argument was rejected this month by judges in California and Oklahoma in circumstances towards opioid producers.

The Ohio case is the primary time the retail aspect of the drug trade has been held accountable within the U.S. opioid disaster, the Times reported. CVS Health, Walmart and Walgreens are three of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains.

Following the decision, the trial decide will resolve how a lot every of the pharmacy chains must pay Lake and Trumbull counties in northeastern Ohio, the Times reported.

The counties’ attorneys stated the three corporations turned a blind eye to suspicious opioid orders for years. Eventual oversight necessities have been “too little, too late,” stated Mark Lanier, the counties’ lead trial lawyer, the Times reported.

Overdose deaths from unlawful opioids have reached file ranges through the COVID-19 pandemic, new U.S. authorities knowledge present, the Times reported.

More data

Visit the National Institute of Drug Abuse for extra on opioids.

SOURCE: The New York Times

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