Naloxone: An important tool, but not the solution to the opioid crisis

In this study, we aimed to define how many patients who were treated with naloxone by an ambulance crew and initially survived were still alive after one year. Even though these patients are typically just observed in the ED hallway, allowed to sober while the ED staff is busy taking care of other patients with life-threatening emergencies like heart attacks, trauma, and strokes, our team hypothesized that the individual sobering in the hallway bed has perhaps one of the highest one-year mortality rates of anyone seen in the department. Here’s how the study worked — and what we found To perform the study, we took advantage of a special project in Massachusetts called the “Chapter 55” legislation which, for the first time, linked many previously separate state databases. We connected the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) database with the all-payer claims database and death records database for our study. In brief, we evaluated patients who received naloxone by EMS over a 30-month period. We then looked at death records one year beyond the first time they received naloxone. During the study period, there were 12,192 naloxone administrations by EMS, which equals over 400 per month. Of these, 6.5% of patients died that same day and 9.3% died within one year. Excluding those who died the same day, about 10% of the patients who initially survived were dead at one year. Even more significant was that 51.4% of those patients died within one month. Also, apart from those who d...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Addiction Health naloxone Source Type: blogs