Hardly Any Teens Receive Effective Treatment For Opioid Addiction
(Reuters Health) - Just a small fraction of adolescents with opioid addiction will receive medications that can help them quit, new research shows.
These medications, usually methadone or suboxone, are prescribed to reduce craving for opiates and ease withdrawal symptoms, and studies show they help opiate users to abstain. In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised doctors to consider medication-assisted treatment, specifically suboxone, for adolescents with “severe opioid use disorders.”
To get a “baseline” sense of medication-assisted treatment in adolescents with opiate or heroin addiction, Kenneth Feder of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore and his colleagues looked at data on 139,092 patients receiving treatment at publicly funded programs in the United States in 2013.
While 26 percent of adult heroin addicts received medication-assisted treatment, that was true for just 2 percent of adolescents.
Among patients addicted to opiates, 12 percent of adults received medication, compared to less than 1 percent of adolescents, the researchers reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
“There’s more that needs to be done across the board to facilitate access to these treatments when they’re medically necessary,” Feder told Reuters Health by phone. “The best validated treatment for somebody struggling with an opiate addiction is treatment that includes some sort of medication assistance.”
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Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news
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