Doctors are still prescribing just as many opioid painkillers to Americans now as they were in 2010, despite the highly-publicized addiction crisis, new research suggests.
Opioid overdoses killed more than 64,000 people in 2016, and experts largely agree that current crisis is driven in part by over-prescription of the addictive painkillers.
In an effort to curb this trend, prescription drug monitoring programs have been implemented or intensified.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had reported that prescription rates for opioids declined between 2011 and 2015, but the new Mayo Clinic study suggests otherwise.
Doctors are likely still over-prescribing opioid painkillers to their patients, as overall prescription rates have hardly changed in 10 years ago, new Mayo Clinic research suggests
Street drugs, particularly heroin, have long been the face of addiction issues in the US, but this time around it is different.
Now, little orange bottles of neat capsules have become the poster for the opioid epidemic, or at least its roots.
As many as 29 percent of people who are prescribed opioids misuse them, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Between four and six percent of those patients end up using heroin.
Eighty percent of heroin users started opioid road with a prescription drug, whether for them or gotten second hand from a friend or family member.
The numbers paint clear picture in which powerful pharmaceuticals like Oxycontin are the villains.
And that means that doctors and the prescriptions they write play a key role in the opioid epidemic.
‘[Doctors] generally do it because their patients are in pain. It’s a really complicated problem. Many of the worst effects of over-prescribing of opioids are faced by society, not individual patients,’ says Dr Molly Jeffery, lead author of the Mayo Clinic research told Daily Mail Online.
The addiction crisis has been in the media constantly for the past year, the president has declared it a public health emergency and many states have cracked down on physicians to make sure they check patient’s opioid histories and track their prescriptions of the drugs.
Numbers from the CDC suggests that, on the prescription end, things have been getting better – and they started improving after 2011.
But, ‘our data suggest that not much has changed in prescription opioid use since about five years ago,’ Dr Jeffery says.
‘I was surprised that we didn’t see much decrease in the proportion of people taking opioids. Within healthcare and health policy circles, tremendous amounts of attention are being paid to opioid prescribing. It was surprising not to see more movement.’
Alongside her colleagues at Mayo Clinic and three US universities, Dr Jefferey analyzed data on 48 million patients.
They focused their research on people with commercial insurance, those over 65 and on Medicare and younger Medicare patients, who are typically on the healthcare plan because they have long-term disabilities.
These groups are at particularly high risk to be over-prescribed opioids as the general degradation of the body over time and disability often result in pain.
In a year, 14 percent of those with commercial insurance received opioid prescriptions, and over a quarter of the over 65 Medicare patients did.
More than half of disabled patients received these drugs. This group consistently had the highest rate of prescriptions for the greatest number and highest dose of pills.
Over 10 years (2007 to 2016), prescription rates and the number of pills people took each day hovered around six or seven percent among patients with commercial insurance.
Notably, the commercially insured group made up almost 90 percent of the study group, which is a larger proportion than the American population with this form of insurance.
Rates and dosages fluctuated more among the other two groups, but followed the same pattern.
The lowest number of opioid prescriptions were written at the beginning of the 10 year period, reached their peak in 2010 or 2013 and fell again slightly by 2016.
According to the most recent data, older Medicare patients take about three 5mg pills a day and disabled Medicare patients take about eight.
‘Based on these historical trends, there remains an unmet patient need to better target the use of prescription opioids,’ says Dr W Michael Hooten, a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist and pain specialist.
‘Our research of patient-level data doesn’t show the decline that was found in previous research,’ Dr Jeffery says.
‘Those declines were seen in the total amount of opioids prescribed across the whole market. We wanted to know how the declines were experienced by individual people. Did fewer people have opioid prescriptions? Did people taking opioids take less over time? When we looked at it that way, we found a different picture.’