Excessive, High-Dose Opioid Prescriptions: Alarming PA Study
| Google Reviews
Peace Valley Recovery is located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Our mission is to provide patient-centered care that focuses on healing and recovery from addiction. This blog provides information, news, and uplifting content to help people in their recovery journey.
Covid-19 may be changing the world as we know it, but the U.S. opioid epidemic never went away, and never let up. Now, a recent study by medical researchers at the University of Pennsylvania has uncovered the alarming rate at which excessive and high-dose opioid prescriptions are being routinely written post-surgery for patients after a common outpatient procedure.
Worryingly, between 2015 and 2019, more than one-third of patients received opioid prescriptions that are above the risk threshold established by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), which are provided to prevent an increased risk of fatal overdose in those taking them – one of the primary reasons the U.S. is still in the grip of the opioid crisis.
“We found massive levels of variation in… patients who are prescribed opioids… We’ve also seen that the average number of pills prescribed was extremely high for outpatient procedures of this type, particularly for patients who had not been taking opioids prior to surgery. – Dr. M. Kit Delgado, epidemiologist and researcher, Perelman School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
These excessive, high-dose opioid prescriptions were written for patients who had just undergone a simple, often non-invasive procedure – arthroscopic knee surgery, one of the three most common outpatient procedures in the U.S.
Penn Study in Detail: Opioid Doses
= 50 Milligrams of Morphine Daily
The objective of the study researched by Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, was to analyse state-level variations in opioid prescriptions written for so-called “opioid-naïve” patients after common knee arthroscopy procedures.
It had previously been established that the majority of patients prescribed opioids after minor surgery had tablets leftover, as these patients reported using less than 10 tablets during their recovery. It was hoped that the study would be highly useful in efforts to reduce the overprescribing of opioids by better understanding any variations, including the dose that patients had been prescribed.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal this year and using data from 2015-19, found that prescription levels varied widely depending on the state in which the individual received the outpatient arthroscopy procedure. For example, only 40% of patients in South Dakota were given opioids, but 85% received them in Nebraska. Additionally, patients were prescribed 24 tablets in Vermont, compared to 45 tablets in Oklahoma.
However, it was the actual strength of the opioid prescriptions that triggered alarm among the study’s researchers. The average prescription was high – 250 milligrams of morphine over a five-day period, equal to 50 mgs per day. This equates to the threshold set by the CDC as a significant marker for increased risk of opioid overdose death, yet it was prescribed to approximately 36% of the patients studied.
Opioid-Related Addiction & Fatal Overdoses
The opioid crisis first came to widespread attention in 2015 when something dramatic happened – for the first time in almost a century, life expectancy in the U.S. dropped, and then entered a period of decline.
According to the data collected by the World Bank Group, the nation’s average life expectancy fell from 78.8 years in 2014 to 78.7 years in 2015. It then went on to drop down to 78.5 years in both 2016 and 2017. It’s dramatic because, in high-income countries like the U.S., life expectancy has been increasing steadily for decades. In fact, the last time that U.S. life expectancy declined in a similar way, it was because of military deaths in the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic, way back in 1915-18.
And the cause of this recent decline? Opioid prescriptions, written out by doctors who were handing out a drug that had been extensively misbranded, and then criminally marketed by pharmaceutical companies for over a 20-year period. This dangerous plethora of legal opioids resulted in widespread addiction, followed by a serious surge in rates of addiction, then fatal overdoses and suicides, both of which were directly linked to the use of opioid drugs.
The fatality rate from drug overdoses more than tripled between 1999 and 2017; those from opioid overdoses increased by almost a staggering 600% during the same period. More U.S. citizens died from opioid overdoses in 2017 than from either HIV- or AIDS-related illnesses at the very peak of the AIDS e