MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Professor Martin Englund MD PhD
Department of Orthopaedics
Lund UniversityMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Currently, there is lack of knowledge of opioid usage in osteoarthritis patients. Opioids are typically not recommended for the treatment of osteoarthritis pain.(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Stuart Lieblich, DMD
Oral and maxillofacial surgeon Avon, CT
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? How does EXPAREL® differ from other pain medication for dental work or other short-term procedures?Response: This study analyzed the use of opioids and non-opioid options for postsurgical pain following third molar extraction (wisdom teeth removal). Our research team reviewed data from 600 patients who underwent third molar extraction, with 300 patients having received non-opioid option EXPAREL (bupivacaine liposome injectable suspension) and 300 patients that did not receive an infiltration of EXPAREL. The study aimed to show that reducing opioid prescriptions following this procedure may decrease opioid-related adverse events and the risk of opioid dependence.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Rebecca L. Haffajee, J.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management & Policy
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MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Evidence suggests that the availability of medications to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) has been slow to expand, particularly in rural areas, despite the efficacy and effectiveness of these medications in reducing overdose deaths and other adverse life outcomes. We were interested in understanding the characteristics of counties both with high need (as measured by above-national rates in opioid overdose deaths) AND low provider capacity to deliver medications to treat OUD in 2017.
We found that such "opioid high-risk" counties were likely to be in the East North Central (e.g., Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana), South Atlantic (e.g., North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia), and Mountain (e.g., New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada) regions.
We also found that these opioid high-risk counties were more likely to have higher rates of unemployment and less likely to have fewer primary care clinicians or be micropolitan (more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
John Holaday, PhD
Chairman and CEO of DisposeRx
Dr. Holaday discusses the recentannouncement that Walgreen's has added DisposeRx to its safe medication drop off kiosks.MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? How big is the problem of unused risky medications leftover after the need or indication period has passed?Response: Keeping leftover medications in the home significantly increases the risk of accidental poisonings as well as diversion, which can lead to addiction, overdoses and death. According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), accidental medicine poisonings send nearly 60,000 children under 5 years old to emergency rooms annually. And, a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that the first opioid used by 70% of individuals with heroin-use disorder was a prescription pain medication, often remaining in their medicine cabinet well after the pain subsided and then a remaining temptation for abuse.
This is a pervasive problem across the country. In an independent survey DisposeRx sponsored, it was found that 4 out of 10 Americans are keeping leftover prescriptions—including opioids – in their medicine cabinets. Other results of the survey include: 62% of respondents who said they stored medications in case a condition returns; and 37% said they save prescription drugs in case a friend or family member needs them.
These consumers need to be educated about all the potential harm resulting from saving leftover medications. Leading pharmacy chains such as Walgreens are committed, as responsible corporate citizens, to making DisposeRx available upon request for their customers and to educate them about its use in getting rid of leftover drugs before they cause harm. Walgreens sees value in adding DisposeRx at-home solution to its comprehensive medication management and opioid stewardship programs as an additional method to reduce risks and exposure.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Jennifer N. Cooper, PhD
Principal Investigator
Center for Innovation in Pediatric Practice
The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital,
Research Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
The Ohio State University College of Medicine
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Although postoperative opioid prescribing has decreased in recent years due to an increased awareness of the risks of excess opioid prescribing, many patients are still prescribed more opioids than they need after surgery. In the pediatric population, most opioids are prescribed after surgical and dental procedures.
Although patients are often prescribed more opioids than they need after surgery, previous studies have found that excess opioids left unused after surgery are rarely properly disposed. These leftover opioids can be misused or accidentally ingested by young children. Previous studies have targeted the problem of non-disposal of opioids leftover after surgery by providing patients and families with educational materials describing proper methods of postoperative opioid disposal. However, these studies have had mixed results with some finding an increase in opioid disposal after education and others finding no effect of such education. In addition to education, another means of facilitating postoperative opioid disposal is the provision of drug disposal products. These products contain compounds that irreversible adsorb or oxidize medications, enabling them to be safely disposed of in the home garbage.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Julie Donohue, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management
Vice Chair for Research
Graduate School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The opioid epidemic is exacting a significant burden on families, communities and health systems across the U.S. Prescription and illicit opioids are responsible for the highest drug overdose mortality rates ever recorded. We know from previous studies that some surgical and medical patients who fill opioid prescriptions immediately after leaving the hospital go on to have chronic opioid use. Until our study, however, little was known about how and if those patients were being introduced to the opioids while in the hospital.
My colleagues and I reviewed the electronic health records of 191,249 hospital admissions of patients who had not been prescribed opioids in the prior year and were admitted to a community or academic hospital in Pennsylvania between 2010 and 2014. Opioids were prescribed in 48% of the admissions, with those patients being given opioids for a little more than two-thirds of their hospital stay, on average.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Arline T. Geronimus Sc.D
Professor, Health Behavior and Health Education
School of Public Health
Research Professor
Population Studies Center
Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan
Member, National Academy of MedicineMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The gap in life expectancy between less and more educated Americans grew over the last 30 years, a deeply troubling fact. We are alone among western nations in these trends. We aimed to determine what causes of death account for this growing educational gap in life expectancy and whether the gap has continued to grow in the most recent years.
Disturbingly, we found the educational gap in life expectancy has continued to grow.
Why? A common theory is that this growing inequality is due to the opioid epidemic. Some even speculate that the less educated are dying from a composite of what they call “deaths of despair” – opioid and other drug overdose, suicide and alcoholic liver disease – with the theory being that as less educated and working class Americans have faced job loss and stagnating wages, they experience hopelessness and despair and turn to drugs, alcohol, or even suicide to ease or end their pain and feelings of hopelessness.
However, while opioid, suicide and alcoholic liver disease deaths have increased among white youth and young adults and is cause for concern, this does not imply that these deaths should be grouped together as “deaths of despair” (DOD) or that they explain the growing educational gaps in life expectancy across all groups – men, women, whites, blacks, or older as well as younger adults.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Nicole Tang, D.Phil, C.Psychol (Reader)
Department of Psychology
Warwick Sleep and Pain Lab
University of Warwick
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Current guidelines recommend non-opioid therapy as the preferred treatment of chronic non-malignant (CNP) pain, with opioids reserved to situations “when benefits for pain and function are expected to outweigh risks” [1,10]. Whilst the effectiveness of opioid therapy is usually measured in terms of pain outcomes, less is known about its effect on day-to-day functions.
A particular function of concern to patients with chronic non-malignant pain
is the ability to get a good night's sleep.
The current systematic review has identified a set of papers with relevant outcomes regarding the effect of opioid therapy on sleep quality and sleep architecture in CNP patients. It
extends our understanding from the drug's respiratory depression effect in healthy
individuals to the potential risks and utility of opioid therapy for chronic non-malignant pain
patients with sleep disturbances.
Whilst the narrative synthesis and the exploratory meta-analysis of a subset of data both suggest that the use of opioid therapy is associated with an overall report of sleep quality improvement, such an improvement is not consistently replicated across studies
or substantiated by improvements in sleep parameters linked to deeper and better-sleep quality. Moreover, the improvement may be accompanied by undesirable side effects and increased daytime sleepiness that contradict with the very idea of improved
sleep quality. We are also painfully aware of the methodological limitations of the studies reviewed; their exposure to different sources of biases has heightened the risk of result inflation.
To many patients with chronic non-malignant pain, improved sleep is a top priority
when evaluating the performance of a new drug and non-drug intervention.
If we were to advance our current understanding of the
opioid-sleep relationship, future trials need to be designed with
this interdisciplinary question in mind such that validated measures
of sleep can be incorporated as an outcome measure alongside pain.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Ashraf Habib, MD
Chief of the Division of Women’s Anesthesia
Professor of Anesthesiology
Duke UniversityMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: This was a multicenter study conducted in 13 clinical sites in the United States enrolling patients undergoing elective Cesarean-section and receiving spinal anesthesia. 186 patients were enrolled and randomized to receive EXPAREL, a long-acting, non-opioid option to manage postsurgical pain, administered via transversus abdominis plane (TAP) field block, mixed with plain bupivacaine or TAP block with plain bupivacaine alone. A TAP block numbs the nerves that supply the abdominal wall. We presented the data at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Society of Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology (SOAP) in Phoenix, AZ.
We aimed to collect clinical evidence that a multimodal postsurgical pain regimen using a TAP block with EXPAREL (bupivacaine liposome injectable suspension) together with regularly scheduled acetaminophen and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) could reduce opioid consumption more so than a standard multimodal pain control approach that combines TAP block with standard bupivacaine, regularly scheduled acetaminophen, and NSAIDs.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Katie Suda, PharmD, M.S.
Associate Professor
College of Pharmacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
Dr. Susan Rowan, DDS
Clinical Associate Professor, Executive Associate Dean of Clinical Affairs
College of Dentistry
University of Illinois at Chicago,MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?Dr. Katie Suda: Dentists treat a lot of pain – we have all probably had the experience of a terrible tooth ache. All dentists treat pain worldwide so we would not expect a large difference in which pain medication is prescribed. However, our results show that US dentists prescribe opioids more frequently than is likely needed. This is especially true because studies have shown that non-opioid pain medications are similar or more effective for the treatment of oral pain.(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Marilyn M. Heng, MD, MPH, FRCSC
Orthopaedic Trauma Surgeon
Assistant Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery
Harvard Medical SchoolMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The ultimate background for this study does come from the larger context of the opioid epidemic that is seen worldwide but particularly in North America. Orthopaedic surgeons should take responsibility as being among the top prescribers of opioids.
The more specific background that led to this specific study was the observation that several colleagues would insist that a drug like hydromorphone was so dangerous that they would not prescribe it but seemed okay prescribing large amounts of oxycodone. It seemed like an urban myth that the type of opioid was what made it dangerous, so that led us to do the study to see if there was evidence for that.(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Kao-Ping Chua, M.D., Ph.D.
Department of Pediatrics
Susan B. Meister Child Health Evaluation and Research Center
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Doctor and pharmacy shopping is a high-risk behavior in which patients obtain opioid prescriptions from multiple prescribers and fill them at multiple pharmacies. Because this behavior is associated with a high risk of overdose death, there have been many efforts to help clinicians detect doctor and pharmacy shopping among patients prescribed opioids. For example, 49 states have a prescription drug monitoring program that provides information on patients’ prior controlled substance prescriptions.
In contrast, there has been little attention to the possibility that patients prescribed opioids may have family members who are engaged in opioid doctor and pharmacy shopping. Such family members may divert opioids prescribed to patients because of their access to these opioids.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Jan Klimas, PhD, MSc
Senior Postdoctoral Fellow
BC Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU)
Vancouver, BC
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Some individuals prescribed opioid analgesic medications for pain develop opioid use disorder. So, much research has been conducted to develop strategies to identify patients who can be safely prescribed opioid analgesics. However, this research has not been critically reviewed through rigorous quality assessment.
This study therefore sought to identify signs, symptoms & screening tools to identify patients with pain who can be safely prescribed opioids(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Sophia K. Chiu, MD
Epidemic Intelligence Service, CDC
Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations, and Field Studies
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
CDCMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Responders across the United States are reporting work-related health effects during incidents in which suspected opioids (including fentanyl) and other illicit drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, cathinones, and synthetic cannabinoids are present, often as a mixture. These health effects have interfered with responders’ ability to perform their job duties.
Since 2018, a number of responder organizations have requested that NIOSH investigate the health effects experienced by emergency responders during these response incidents. These organizations are looking for ways to protect their responders and prevent the symptoms responders have reported experiencing, so that they can in turn better serve the public. NIOSH’s goal is to increase awareness among responders of how they can remain safe while providing the care the public needs.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Leah LaRue, PharmD, PMP
Associate Director, Clinical Affairs
Millennium Health
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Drug overdose deaths continue to increase, despite the leveling off of prescription opioid use and policy changes limiting opioid prescribing. While fentanyl has garnered most of the attention, overdose deaths involving cocaine and methamphetamine also have increased markedly over the past few years. It is possible that those increases are due not just to those drugs, but to concomitant use with fentanyl.
To better understand what is causing this rapid increase in overdose deaths, it is important to characterize the emerging combination of other illicit drugs with fentanyl, which increases the risk of overdose. The purpose of this study was to determine whether rates of the combination of nonprescribed fentanyl with cocaine or methamphetamine have changed in urine drug test (UDT) results through time.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Joel E. Segel, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Policy and Administration
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Earlier research has shown that the societal costs of opioid misuse are high, including the impact on employment. However, previous work to understand the costs of opioid misuse borne by state and federal governments has largely focused on medical costs such as care related to overdoses and the cost of treating opioid use disorder.
Our main findings are that when individuals who misuse opioids are unable to work, state and federal governments may bear significant costs in the form of lost income and sales tax revenue. We estimate that between 2000 and 2016, state governments lost $11.8 billion in tax revenue and the federal government lost $26.0 billion.(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Joanne Spetz, PhD
Professor
Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies
San Francisco, CA 94143-0936MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Medication treatment is an important component of treatment for opioid use disorder. Buprenorphine has been the focus of policies designed to increase access to treatment and is the most widely-used medication due to well-established evidence of its efficacy and its accessibility outside licensed narcotics treatment programs. The most common brand name for this medication is Suboxone.
There is a shortage of providers authorized to prescribe it, in part because only physicians were permitted to obtain waivers from the Drug Enforcement Agency to prescribe it outside of licensed narcotics treatment programs until the opioid bill of 2016. That bill granted nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) the ability to apply for waivers. However, in states that require NPs and/or PAs to be supervised by or collaborate with a physician, there are additional requirements regarding the training of the physician before the NP or PA can apply for a waiver. This affects nearly half of states for NPs, and all states for PAs.
We found that the average percentage of NPs with waivers was 5.6% in states that do not require physician supervision, but only 2.4% in more restrictive states. Even after adjusting for other factors, we found that the percentage of NPs with waivers was 75% higher when physician oversight is not required. We didn’t find a similar result for PAs, probably because they must have physician oversight in all states.(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Serena Day, MD
Ohio State UniversityMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: The idea for this research came from my own observations of patients that I was caring for in the hospital first as an Internal Medicine Resident and now as a senior Cardiology Fellow. I did my residency here at Ohio State and noticed a marked increase in the number of patients with endocarditis that we were caring for just in my short time here as a trainee.
Over 5 years, we saw an increase of 436% in intravenous drug use related endocarditis. How this disease is treated as changed as well. It used to be that if a patient was a good surgical candidate, we would offer a replacement valve. Now, we see that these patient's have such a high rate of recurrent intravenous drug use and reinfection of their heart valves that we now treat with antibiotics only rather than surgery. In many cases, the infection never goes away because we can't offer definitive therapy with surgery due to their high relapse and reinfection rates of nearly 50%.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Paul Cagle, Jr. MD
Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings ie What are some of the significant comorbidities?Response: In this study our goal was to better understand what medical issues (medical comorbidities) can cause trouble or issue for patients with a proximal humerus fracture (shoulder fracture). To tackle this issue we used a large national sample of patients and sorted our the different medical issues the patients had.
We found that patients with increased medical issues had longer hospital stays and higher use of opioid medications (pain medications).
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Alexis Colvin, MD
Associate Professor of Orthopedic Surgery
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount SinaiMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: 40% of all opioid overdose deaths involve a prescription opioid and orthopaedic surgeons are the 3rd highest prescribers of opioids. Set guidelines for post surgery opioid prescriptions have not been established. Arthroscopic knee meniscectomy is one of the most common orthopaedic procedures. The purpose of this study was to determine how many opioids were being prescribed among a group of six sports fellowship trained orthopaedic surgeons versus how many patients were actually using.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Wenjia Zhu, PhD.
Marshall J. Seidman Fellow
Department of Health Care Policy
Harvard Medical SchoolMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: The current opioid epidemic continues to cause deaths and tremendous suffering in the United States, driven in large part by overuse of prescription opioids. Of special concern are new opioid prescriptions, i.e. opioids given to patients who have not used opioids before, which research tells us are an important gateway to long-term opioid use, misuse, overdoes and death. Recently, in their efforts to curb over prescribing of opioids, the CDC issued guidelines (December 2015 in draft form; March 2016 in final version) to encourage opioid prescribers to limit the use, duration and dose of opioids, particularly opioids to first-time users. Despite these, little is known about the prescribing of opioids to first-time users on a national scale, particularly among commercially insured patients.
In this study, we examined national monthly trends in the rate at which opioid therapy was started among commercially insured patients. Using administrative claims from Blue Cross Blue Shield Association commercial insurers from 2012 to 2017, we analyzed more than 86 million commercially insured patients across the United States.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Howard Franklin, MD, MBA
Vice President of Medical Affairs and Strategy
Salix Pharmaceuticals
MedicalResearch.com: What is opioid-induced constipation?Response: Opioid-induced constipation (OIC) is a side effect in as many as 80 percent of chronic pain patients on opioids. OIC is unlikely to improve over time without treatment and can lead to suffering and discomfort. More importantly, the insufficient treatment of OIC can have negative implications for patients, both those on opioid therapy for chronic non-cancer pain as well as advanced illness, and for hospitals.(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Cory E. Cronin PhD
Department of Social and Public Health
Ohio University College of Health Sciences and Professions
Athens, Ohio
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: One of my primary areas of research is exploring how hospitals interact with their local communities. My own background is in health administration and sociology, and I have been working with colleagues in the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine here at Ohio University (Berkeley Franz, Dan Skinner and Zelalem Haile) to conduct a series of studies looking at questions related to these hospital-community interactions.
This particular question occurred to us because of the timeliness of the opioid epidemic. In analyzing data collected from the American Hospital Association and other sources, we identified that the number of hospitals offering in-patient and out-patient substance use disorder services actually dropped in recent years, in spite of the rising number of overdoses due to opioid use. Other factors seemed to matter more in regard to whether a hospital offered these services or not.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Mathew Vinhhoa Kiang, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Primary Care and Outcomes Research
Stanford University School of Medicine
Stanford, California
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Nationally, opioid-related mortality has continued to climb for decades and resulted in over 42,000 deaths in 2016 — more than the number of deaths from car accidents or firearms. However, there are substantial differences across states and by opioid type. We sought to systematically describe these differences by examining state-level opioid mortality by opioid type. Deaths from synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, are rapidly increasing in the eastern half of the US. Specifically, 28 states have synthetic opioid mortality rates that are more than doubling every two years. Twelve of those states already have high levels of synthetic opioid mortality — above 10 deaths per 100,000. Lastly, the opioid epidemic has reached our nation's capital — Washington DC has the fastest rate of increase, more than tripling every year, and a high opioid mortality rate.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Brian J. Piper, PhD, MS
Assistant Professor of Neuroscience
Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Fentanyl is an important opioid for pain management but also has exceptional potential for misuse. Illicitly manufactured fentanyl accounts for a large portion of opioid overdoses. Seven states including Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont have recently implemented opioid prescribing laws. The objectives of this study were to:
1) characterize how medical use of fentanyl, fentanyl analogues like sufentanil, alfentanil, and remifentanil, and other opioid use changed over the past decade, and
2) determine whether opioid prescribing laws impacted fentanyl use in the US.
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Automation of Reports and Consolidated Ordering System (ARCOS) is the gold-standard for pharmacoepidemiology research of controlled substances in the US for its comprehensiveness.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Gery Guy, PhD, MPH
Injury Center
CDC
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: This study examined opioid prescribing at the national and county-level in 2015 and 2017.
During 2015 to 2017, the amount of opioids prescribed decreased 20.1% in the United States. The amount of opioids prescribed per person varies substantially at the county-level. The average amount of opioids prescribed in the highest quartile of counties was nearly 6 times the amount in the lowest quartile. Reductions in opioid prescribing could be related to policies and strategies aimed at reducing inappropriate prescribing, increased awareness of the risks associated with opioids, and release of the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Lawrence M. Kessler, PhD Research Assistant Professor
Matthew C. Harris, PhD Assistant Professor
Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research and Department of Economics
The University of Tennessee MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?Response: Motivation for this study came from Co-Author, Matt Murray, who was at a speaking engagement and heard a community business leader say “we’ve got jobs, but no one is applying, could opioids be a contributing factor?” This led to a conversation back at the Boyd Center between us and Matt Murray, where we decided that if we could get data on prescription rates, we could answer this question empirically.
We started by contacting each state agency in charge of their respective prescription drug monitoring program to see if they’d be willing to share county-level data on prescription opioid rates. From this letter-writing campaign we received data from 10 states, which formed the basis for our analysis. As time went on, new data was made publicly available and we were able to expand the analysis to all 50 states.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Qiushi Chen (first author) and
Jagpreet Chhatwal PhD
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
Senior Scientist, Institute for Technology Assessment
Massachusetts General Hospital
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Opioid overdose epidemic is a national public health emergency — in 2017, more than 49,000 people died from overdose. Our study shows that under current conditions, the number of deaths is projected to increase to 81,700 by 2025. Efforts to curb the epidemic by reducing the incidence of prescription opioid misuse — the primary focus of current interventions — will have a modest effect of 3-5% reduction in overdose deaths.
(more…)
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Sarah M. Bagley MD, MSc
Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics
Director, CATALYST Clinic
Boston University School of Medicine/Boston Medical Center
Boston, MA
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Response: Urine drug testing is a routine part of the management of primary care patients with opioid use disorder treated with medications such as buprenorphine. In addition, most providers also ask patients about recent drug use.
The point of this study was to see the agreement between the urine drug testing and what patients told a nurse and whether that changed the longer a patient was in treatment. We found that truthful disclosure of opioid and cocaine use increased with time in treatment and that urine drug tests are a useful tool to monitor patients.(more…)
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