21st Century Scourge

The CDC recently put out apaperin their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) that studied the likelihood of long term opiate use after initial treatment with an opioid medication for acute pain. The results, for me as a regular prescriber of opioid medications, were fairly shocking. The study randomly reviewed 10% of patient records from the Lifelink database over the time period of 2006-2015. If a patient was given a prescription for an opioid for longer than 10 days, there was a 1 in 5 chance that patient would be a regular opiate user one year later. That's just staggering.Few are unaware of the opioid epidemic sweeping through America. In 2015, 52,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. That's more than the number of Americans who died during the peak of the AIDS epidemic. And this scourge has been particularly problematic in predominantly rural, working class areas. The mortality rate for white, middle aged Americans without a college degree has gone up a half a percent every year from 1999-2015. This precipitous drop in life expectancy amongst a demographic cohort is unprecedented in an advanced western democracy--- the only comparable decline was seen in Russian males in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union.  Many epidemiologists attribute much of the startling rise in death rates of white middle aged Americans to opiate overdoses. But it's far more complex than a simple x=y formulation...
Source: Buckeye Surgeon - Category: Surgery Authors: Source Type: blogs