Doctors Are Writing Half as Many New Opioid Prescriptions as They Used To, Study Says

Deaths from opioid overdoses have increased dramatically over the last decade. In 2017, the latest year for which the U.S. government has statistics on the trend, more than 47,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses. One major factor contributing to the rising number of people who get addicted to opioids and die from overdoses is the increasing number of prescriptions written by doctors to treat pain. Overdose deaths related to such prescriptions increased five times from 1999 to 2017. But according to the latest study looking at opioid prescribing patterns, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, recent efforts to address the rising number of prescriptions may be working to limit the number of opioids that doctors dispense. In the study, researchers led by Wenjia Zhu, a fellow in the department of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, and Nicole Maestas, an associate professor also in the department, found that new prescriptions for opioids dropped by about half from 2012 to 2017. The researchers analyzed national claims data from Blue Cross-Blue Shield from more than 86 million people to monitor prescriptions for opioids. They calculated the monthly incidence of new opioid prescriptions as the percentage of enrollees getting a prescription for an opioid who had never received such a prescription or who had not received one in the previous six months. During the study period, the monthly incidence of opioid prescriptions dropped by 54%, and the number of do...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Drugs Source Type: news