30 Search Results for "opioid"
Pain Circuit Discovery in the Brain Suggests Promising Alternative to Opioid Painkillers
Posted on by Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D.
Chronic pain is an often-debilitating health condition and serious public health concern, affecting more than 50 million Americans.1 The opioid and overdose crisis, which stems from inadequate pain treatment, continues to have a devastating impact on families and communities across the country. To combat both challenges, we urgently need new ways to treat acute and chronic pain effectively without the many downsides of opioids.
While there are already multiple classes of non-opioid pain medications and other approaches to manage pain, unfortunately none have proved as effective as opioids when it comes to pain relief. So, I’m encouraged to see that an NIH-funded team now has preclinical evidence of a promising alternative target for pain-relieving medicines in the brain.2
Rather than activating opioid receptors, the new approach targets receptors for a nerve messenger known as acetylcholine in a portion of the brain involved in pain control. Based on findings from animal models, it appears that treatments targeting acetylcholine could offer pain relief even in people who have reduced responsiveness to opioids. Their findings suggest that the treatment approach has the potential to remain effective in combatting pain long-term and with limited risk for withdrawal symptoms or addiction.
The researchers, led by Daniel McGehee, University of Chicago, focused their attention on non-opioid pathways in the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray (vlPAG), a brain area involved in pain control. They had previously shown that activating acetylcholine receptors, which are part of the vlPAG’s underlying circuitry, could relieve pain.3 However, they found that when the body is experiencing pain, it unexpectedly suppresses acetylcholine rather than releasing more.
To understand how and why this is happening, McGehee and Shivang Sullere, now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, conducted studies in mice to understand how acetylcholine is released under various pain states. They found that mice treated with a drug that stimulates an acetylcholine receptor known as alpha-7 (⍺7) initially led to more activity in the nervous system. But this activity quickly gave way to a prolonged inactive or quiet state that delivered pain relief. Interestingly, this unexpected inhibitory effect lasted for several hours.
Additional studies in mice that had developed a tolerance to opioids showed the same long-lasting pain relief. This encouraging finding was expected since opioids use a pathway separate from acetylcholine. In more good news, the animals didn’t show any signs of dependence or addiction either. For instance, in the absence of pain, they didn’t prefer spending time in environments where they’d receive the ⍺7-targeted drug.
Imaging studies measuring brain activity revealed greater activity in cells expressing ⍺7 with higher levels of pain. When that activity was blocked, pain levels dropped. The finding suggests to the researchers it may be possible to monitor pain levels through brain imaging. It’s also possible the acetylcholine circuitry in the brain may play a role in the process whereby acute or temporary pain becomes chronic.
Finding treatments to modify acetylcholine levels or target acetylcholine receptors may therefore offer a means to treat pain and prevent it from becoming chronic. Encouragingly, drugs acting on these receptors already have been tested for use in people for treating other health conditions. It will now be important to learn whether these existing therapeutics or others like them may act as highly effective, non-addictive painkillers, with important implications for alleviating chronic pain.
References:
[1] NIH HEAL Initiative Research Plan. NIH HEAL Initiative.
[2] Sullere S et al. A cholinergic circuit that relieves pain despite opioid tolerance. Neuron. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2023.08.017 (2023).
[3] Umana IC et al. Nicotinic modulation of descending pain control circuitry. Pain. PMID: 28817416; PMCID: PMC5873975 (2017).
Links:
The Helping to End Addiction Long-term® (HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
Pain (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke/NIH)
Opioids (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
Daniel McGehee (University of Chicago, Illinois)
NIH Support: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institute on Drug Abuse
Help for Babies Born Dependent on Opioids
Posted on by Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D.
It’s been estimated that every 18 minutes in the United States, a newborn baby starts life with painful withdrawals from exposure to opioids in the womb. It’s called neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS), and it makes for a challenging start in life. These infants may show an array of withdrawal symptoms, including tremors, extreme irritability, and problems eating and sleeping.
Many of these infants experience long, difficult hospital stays to help them manage their withdrawal symptoms. But because hospital staff have no established evidence-based treatment standards to rely on, there is substantial variation in NOWS treatment around the country. There also are many open questions about the safest and most-effective way to support these babies and their families.
But answers are coming. The New England Journal of Medicine just published clinical trial results that evaluated care for infants with NOWS and which offer some much needed—and rather encouraging—data for families and practitioners [1]. The data are from the Eating, Sleeping, Consoling for Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal (ESC-NOW) trial, led by Leslie W. Young, The University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, Burlington, and her colleagues Lori Devlin and Stephanie Merhar.
The ESC-NOW study is supported through the Advancing Clinical Trials in Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal (ACT NOW) Collaborative. ACT NOW is an essential part of the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, an aggressive effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis and improve lives.
The latest study puts to the test two different approaches to care for newborns with NOWS. The first approach relies on the Finnegan Neonatal Abstinence Scoring Tool. For almost 50 years, doctors primarily assessed NOWS using this tool. It is based on a scoring system of 21 signs of withdrawal, including disturbances in a baby’s nervous system, metabolism, breathing, digestion, and more. However, there have been concerns that this scoring tool has led to an overreliance on treating babies with opioid medications, including morphine and methadone.
The other approach is known as Eat, Sleep, Console (ESC) care [2]. First proposed in 2014, ESC care has been adopted in many hospitals around the world. Rather than focusing on a long list of physical signs of withdrawal, this approach relies on a simpler functional assessment of whether an infant can eat, sleep, and be consoled. It emphasizes treatments other than medication, such as skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding, and care from their mothers or other caregivers in a calm and nurturing environment.
The ESC care approach places an emphasis on the use of supportive interventions and aims to empower families in the care and nurturing of their infants. While smaller quality improvement studies of ESC have been compelling, the question at issue is whether the Eat, Sleep, Console care approach can reduce the time until infants with NOWS are medically ready to go home from the hospital in a wide variety of hospital settings—and, most importantly, whether it can do so safely.
To find out, the ESC-NOW team enrolled 1,305 infants with NOWS who were born after at least 36 weeks gestation. The study’s young participants were largely representative of infants with NOWS in the U.S., although non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic infants were slightly overrepresented. The babies were born at one of 26 U.S. hospitals, and each hospital was randomly assigned to transition from usual care using the Finnegan tool to the ESC care approach at a designated time.
Each hospital had a three-month transition period between the usual care and the ESC to allow clinical teams time to train on the new approach. The trial primarily aimed to understand if there was a significant difference in how long newborns with NOWS spent in the hospital before being medically ready for discharge between those receiving usual care versus those receiving ESC care. Researchers also assessed infants for safety, tracking both safety events that occurred during the hospital stay and events that occurred after the baby left the hospital, such as non-accidental trauma or death during an infant’s first three months.
The reported results reflect 837 of the 1,305 infants, who met the study definition of being medically ready for discharge. Infants who were discharged before meeting the study criteria, which were informed by the 2012 American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations for monitoring of infants with NOWS, were not included in the primary analysis.
Among the 837 infants, those who received ESC care were medically ready for discharge significantly sooner than those who received usual care. On average, they were medically ready to go home after about eight days compared to almost 15 days for the usual care group.
Many fewer infants in the ESC care group were treated with opioids compared to the usual care group (19.5 percent versus 52.0 percent). In more good news for ESC care, there was no difference in safety outcomes through the first three months despite the shorter hospital stays and reduced opioid treatment in the hospital. Infants who were cared for using the ESC care approach were no more likely to visit the doctor’s office, emergency room, or hospital after being discharged from the hospital.
More long-term study is needed to evaluate these children over months and years as they continue to develop and grow. Many of the infants in this study will be evaluated for the first two years of life to assess the long-term impact of ESC care on development and other outcomes. These findings offer encouraging early evidence that the ESC care approach is safe and effective. Although there was some variability in the outcomes, this study also shows that this approach can work well across diverse hospitals and communities.
The ESC-NOW trial is just one portion of the NIH Heal Initiative’s ACT NOW program, focused on gathering scientific evidence on how to care for babies with NOWS. Other studies are evaluating how to safely wean babies who do receive treatment with medication off opioids more quickly. The ACT NOW Longitudinal Study also will enroll at least 200 babies with prenatal opioid exposure and another 100 who were not exposed to better understand the long-term implications of early opioid exposure.
I’ve been anxious to see the results of the ESC-NOW study for a few months. It’s been worth the wait. The results show that we’re headed in the right direction with learning how best to treat NOWS and help to improve the lives of these young children and their families in the months and years ahead.
References:
[1] Eat, Sleep, Console Approach versus usual care for neonatal opioid withdrawal. Young LW, Ounpraseuth ST, Merhar SL, Newman S, Snowden JN, Devlin LA, et al. NEJM, 2023 Apr 30 [Published online ahead of print]
[2] An initiative to improve the quality of care of infants with neonatal abstinence syndrome. Grossman MR, Berkwitt AK, Osborn RR, Xu Y, Esserman DA, Shapiro ED, Bizzarro MJ. Pediatrics. 2017 Jun;139(6):e20163360.
Links:
SAMHSA’s National Helpline (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, MD)
“Eat, Sleep, Console” reduces hospital stay and need for medication among opioid-exposed infants, NIH news release, May 1, 2023
Helping to End Addiction Long-term® (HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
Advancing Clinical Trials in Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal (ACT NOW)
Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program (NIH)
Leslie Young (The University of Vermont, Larner College of Medicine, Burlington)
NIH Support: The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences; Office of the Director
Small Study Suggests Approved Insomnia Drug Can Aid in Opioid Recovery
Posted on by Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D.
Opioid use disorders (OUD) now threaten the health and lives of far too many young and adult Americans. While getting treatment is a key first step to recovery, overcoming an opioid addiction often comes with brutal withdrawal symptoms, including bad bouts of insomnia that are often untreatable with traditional prescription sleep medications. These medications act as sedatives, making them unsafe for people in OUD recovery.
But now, researchers have found that an approved drug for insomnia that works differently than other sleep medications could offer some needed help for the sleeplessness that affects those overcoming an opioid addiction [1]. The drug, known as suvorexant (Belsomra ®), was provided in a study to people during and immediately after tapering off opioids, and it allowed them to sleep significantly more during this week-long period. Suvorexant also helped to reduce their opioid withdrawal and craving.
This study, which received support from NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative certainly offers promising news. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved suvorexant to treat insomnia in 2014, and it is available for off-label use to help people overcoming an OUD.
The good news, however, comes with a major caveat. This early clinical trial had relatively small enrollment numbers, and larger studies are definitely needed to follow up and confirm the initial results.
The latest findings, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, come from a team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, led by Andrew Huhn. He and colleagues recognized sleep disturbances as a severe problem during recovery. They wondered whether suvorexant might help.
Suvorexant doesn’t actively sedate people like other sleeping medications. Suvorexant works by targeting orexin, a biochemical made in the brain that helps keep you awake [2]. Interestingly, orexin signals also have been implicated in opioid withdrawal symptoms, sleep disturbances, and drug-seeking behaviors.
Thirty-eight people entered the Hopkins study, and 26 completed it. Their average age was about 40, with close to equal numbers of white and Black participants. Most were male, and all were undergoing supervised withdrawal treatment with buprenorphine/naloxone, which is used in combination as a medication-assisted treatment for OUD.
To find out if suvorexant helped, the researchers measured total sleep time nightly using wireless devices that recorded brain activity and movement in people taking either 20 milligrams or 40 milligrams of suvorexant versus a placebo. The researchers also used standard methods to assess symptoms of opioid withdrawal, along with suvorexant’s potential for abuse.
The data showed that people taking suvorexant over four days while tapering off opioids slept about 90 minutes longer per night on average. They also continued to sleep for an extra hour a night on average in the four days following the tapering period. The researchers note that these increases in sleep duration far exceed the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s threshold for clinically meaningful improvement.
The researchers also didn’t see any differences in adverse events between those taking suvorexant versus a placebo. They also note that the main side effect of suvorexant in general is feeling sleepy the next day as the drug wears off slowly. There also wasn’t any evidence that suvorexant might come with a risk for drug abuse.
However, because the study was small, it lacked the needed statistical power to determine meaningful differences between the two doses of suvorexant. The study also didn’t include many women. But overall, the evidence that suvorexant or even other medications that target orexin could improve OUD treatment appears quite promising.
The NIH’s HEAL Initiative has launched over 600 research projects across the country. These studies cover a range of science and health care needs. But a common thread running through these projects is a desire to enhance the evidence base for lifesaving OUD interventions. Another is a commitment to discover better ways to help people recover from an OUD, and these latest data on suvorexant show this commitment in action.
References:
[1] Suvorexant ameliorated sleep disturbance, opioid withdrawal, and craving during a buprenorphine taper. Huhn AS, Finan PH, Gamaldo CE, Hammond AS, Umbricht A, Bergeria CL, Strain EC, Dunn KE. Sci Transl Med. 2022 Jun 22;14(650):eabn8238.
[2] The hypocretin/orexin system. Ebrahim IO, et al. J R Soc Med. 2002 May;95(5):227-30.
Links:
SAMHSA’s National Helpline (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, MD)
Opioids (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
Andrew Huhn (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore)
NIH Support: National Institute on Drug Abuse
Research to Address the Real-Life Challenges of Opioid Crisis
Posted on by Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D.
While great progress has been made in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s opioid crisis continues to evolve in unexpected ways. The opioid crisis, which worsened during the pandemic and now involves the scourge of fentanyl, claims more than 70,000 lives each year in the United States [1]. But throughout the pandemic, NIH has continued its research efforts to help people with a substance use disorder find the help that they so need. These efforts include helping to find relief for the millions of Americans who live with severe and chronic pain.
Recently, I traveled to Atlanta for the Rx and Illicit Drug Summit 2022. While there, I moderated an evening fireside chat with two of NIH’s leaders in combating the opioid crisis: Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA); and Rebecca Baker, director of Helping to End Addiction Long-term® (HEAL) initiative. What follows is an edited, condensed transcript of our conversation.
Tabak: Let’s start with Nora. When did the opioid crisis begin, and how has it changed over the years
Volkow: It started just before the year 2000 with the over-prescription of opioid medications. People were becoming addicted to them, many from diverted product. By 2010, CDC developed guidelines that decreased the over-prescription. But then, we saw a surge in heroin use. That turned the opioid crisis into two problems: prescription opioids and heroin.
In 2016, we encountered the worst scourge yet. It is fentanyl, an opioid that’s 50 times more potent than heroin. Fentanyl is easily manufactured, and it’s easier than other opioids to hide and transport across the border. That makes this drug very profitable.
What we have seen during the pandemic is the expansion of fentanyl use in the United States. Initially, fentanyl made its way to the Northeast; now it’s everywhere. Initially, it was used to contaminate heroin; now it’s used to contaminate cocaine, methamphetamine, and, most recently, illicit prescription drugs, such as benzodiazepines and stimulants. With fentanyl contaminating all these drugs, we’re also seeing a steep rise in mortality from cocaine and methamphetamine use in African Americans, American Indians, and Alaska natives.
Tabak: What about teens? A recent study in the journal JAMA reported for the first time in a decade that overdose deaths among U.S. teens rose dramatically in 2020 and kept rising through 2021 [2]. Is fentanyl behind this alarming increase?
Volkow: Yes, and it has us very concerned. The increase also surprised us. Over the past decade, we have seen a consistent decrease in adolescent drug use. In fact, there are some drugs that have the lowest usage rates that we’ve ever recorded. To observe this more than doubling of overdose deaths from fentanyl before the COVID pandemic was a major surprise.
Adolescents don’t typically use heroin, nor do they seek out fentanyl. Our fear is adolescents are misusing illicit prescriptions contaminated with fentanyl. Because an estimated 30-40 percent of those tainted pills contain levels of fentanyl that can kill you, it becomes a game of Russian roulette. This dangerous game is being played by adolescents who may just be experimenting with illicit pills.
Tabak: For people with substance use disorders, there are new ways to get help. In fact, one of the very few positive outcomes of the pandemic is the emergence of telehealth. If we can learn to navigate the various regulatory issues, do you see a place for telehealth going forward?
Volkow: When you have a crisis like this one, there’s a real need to accelerate interventions and innovation like telehealth. It certainly existed before the pandemic, and we knew that telehealth was beneficial for the treatment of substance use disorders. But it was very difficult to get reimbursement, making access extremely limited.
When COVID overwhelmed emergency departments, people with substance use disorders could no longer get help there. Other interventions were needed, and telehealth helped fill the void. It also had the advantage of reaching rural populations in states such as Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, where easy access to treatment or unique interventions can be challenging. In many prisons and jails, administrators worried about bringing web-based technologies into their facilities. So, in partnership with the Justice Department, we have created networks that now will enable the entry of telehealth into jails and prisons.
Tabak: Rebecca, it’s been four years since the HEAL initiative was announced at this very summit in 2018. How is the initiative addressing this ever-evolving crisis?
Baker: We’ve launched over 600 research projects across the country at institutions, hospitals, and research centers in a broad range of scientific areas. We’re working to come up with new treatment options for pain and addiction. There’s exciting research underway to address the craving and sleep disruption caused by opioid withdrawal. This research has led to over 20 investigational new drug applications to the FDA. Some are for repurposed drugs, compounds that have already been shown to be safe and effective for treating other health conditions that may also have value for treating addiction. Some are completely novel. We have also initiated the first testing of an opioid vaccine, for oxycodone, to prevent relapse and overdose in high-risk individuals.
Tabak: What about clinical research?
Baker: We’re testing multiple different treatments for both pain and addiction. Not everyone with pain is the same, and not every treatment is going to work the same for everyone. We’re conducting clinical trials in real-world settings to find out what works best for patients. We’re also working to implement lifesaving, evidence-based interventions into places where people seek help, including faith, community, and criminal justice settings.
Tabak: The pandemic highlighted inequities in our health-care system. These inequities afflict individuals and populations who are struggling with addiction and overdose. Nora, what needs to be done to address the social determinants of racial disparities?
Volkow: This is an extraordinarily important question. As you noted, certain racial and ethnic groups had disproportionately higher mortality rates from COVID. We have seen the same with overdose deaths. For example, we know that the most important intervention for preventing overdoses is to initiate medications such as methadone, buprenorphine or vivitrol. But Black Americans are initiated on these medications at least five years later than white Americans. Similarly, Black Americans also are less likely to receive the overdose-reversal medication naloxone.
That’s not right. We must ask what are the core causes of limited access to high-quality health care? Low income is a major contributing factor. Helping people get an education is one of the most important factors to address it. Another factor is distrust of the medical system. When racial and ethnic discrimination is compounded by discrimination because a person has a substance use disorder, you can see why it becomes very difficult for some to seek help. As a society, we certainly need to address racial discrimination. But we also need to address discrimination against substance use disorders in people of all races who are vulnerable.
Baker: Our research is tackling these barriers head on with a direct focus on stigma. As Nora alluded to, oftentimes providers may not offer lifesaving medication to some patients, and we’ve developed and are testing research training to help providers recognize and address their own biases and behaviors in caring for different populations.
We have supported research on the drivers of equity. A big part of this is engaging with people with lived experience and making sure that the interventions being designed are feasible in the real world. Not everyone has access to health insurance, transportation, childcare—the support that they may need to sustain treatment and recovery. In short, our research is seeking ways to enhance linkage to treatment.
Nora mentioned the importance of telehealth in improving equity. That’s another research focus, as well as developing tailored, culturally appropriate interventions for addressing pain and addiction. When you have this trust issue, you can’t always go in with a prescription or a recommendation from a physician. So in American and Alaskan native communities, we’re integrating evidence-based prevention approaches with traditional practices like wellness gatherings, cooking together, use of sage and spirituality, along with community support, and seeing if that encourages and increases the uptake of these prevention approaches in communities that need it so much.
Tabak: The most heartbreaking impact of the opioid crisis has been the infants born dependent on opioids. Rebecca, what’s being done to help the very youngest victims of the opioid crisis born with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome, or NOWS?
Baker: Thanks for asking about the infants. Babies with NOWS undergo withdrawal at birth and cry inconsolably, often with extreme stomach upset and sometimes even with seizures. Our research found that hospitals across the country vary greatly in how they treat these babies. Our program, ACT NOW, or Advancing Clinical Trials in Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal, aims to provide concrete guidance for nurses in the NICU treating these infants. One of the studies that we call Eat, Sleep, Console focuses on the abilities of the baby. Our researchers are testing if the ability to eat, sleep, or be consoled increases bonding with the mother and if it reduces time in the hospital, as well as other long-term health outcomes.
In addition to that NOWS program, we’ve also launched the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study, or HBCD, that seeks to understand the long-term consequences of opioid exposure together with all the other environmental and other factors the baby experiences as they grow up. The hope is that together these studies will inform future prevention and treatment efforts for both mental health and also substance use and addiction.
Tabak: As the surge in heroin use and appearance of fentanyl has taught us, the opioid crisis has ever-changing dynamics. It tells us that we need better prevention strategies. Rebecca, could you share what HEAL is doing about prevention?
Baker: Prevention has always been a core component of the HEAL Initiative in a number of ways. The first is by preventing unnecessary opioid exposures through enhanced and evidence-based pain management. HEAL is supporting research on new small molecules, new devices, new biologic therapeutics that could treat pain and distinct pain conditions without opioids. And we’re also researching and providing guidance for clinicians on strategies for managing pain without medication, including acupuncture and physical therapy. They can often be just as effective and more sustainable.
HEAL is also working to address risky opioid use outside of pain management, especially in high-risk groups. That includes teens and young adults who may be experimenting, people lacking stable housing, patients who are on high-dose opioids for pain management, or they maybe have gone off high-dose opioids but still have them in their possession.
Finally, to prevent overdose we have to give naloxone to the people who need it. The HEALing Communities Study has taken some really innovative approaches to providing naloxone in libraries, on the beach, and places where overdoses are actually happening, not just in medical settings. And I think that will be, in our fight against the overdose crisis, a key tool.
Volkow: Larry, I’d like to add a few words on prevention. There are evidence-based interventions that have been shown to be quite effective for preventing substance use among teenagers and young adults. And yet, they are not implemented. We have evidence-based interventions that work for prevention. We have evidence-based interventions that work for treatment. But we don’t provide the resources for their implementation, nor do we train the personnel that can carry it over.
Science can give us tools, but if we do not partner at the next level for their implementation, those tools do not have the impact they should have. That’s why I always bring up the importance of policy in the implementation phase.
Tabak: Rebecca, the opioid crisis got started with a lack of good options for treating pain. Could you share with us how HEAL’s research efforts are addressing the needs of millions of Americans who experience both chronic pain and opioid use disorder?
Baker: It’s so important to remember people with pain. We can’t let our efforts to combat the opioid crisis make us lose sight of the needs of the millions of Americans with pain. One hundred million Americans experience pain; half of them have severe pain, daily pain, and 20 million have such severe pain that they can’t do things that are important to them in their life, family, job, other activities that bring their life meaning.
HEAL recognizes that these individuals need better options. New non-addictive pain treatments. But as you say, there is a special need for people with a substance use disorder who also have pain. They desperately need new and better options. And so we recently, through the HEAL Initiative, launched a new trials network that couples medication-based treatment for opioid use disorders, so that’s methadone or buprenorphine, with new pain-management strategies such as psychotherapy or yoga in the opioid use disorder treatment setting so that you’re not sending them around to lots of different places. And our hope is that this integrated approach will address some of the fragmented healthcare challenges that often results in poor care for these patients.
My last point would be that some patients need opioids to function. We can’t forget as we make sure that we are limiting risky opioid use that we don’t take away necessary opioids for these patients, and so our future research will incorporate ways of making sure that they receive needed treatment while also preventing them from the risks of opioid use disorder.
Tabak: Rebecca, let me ask you one more question. What do you want the folks here to remember about HEAL?
Baker: HEAL stands for Helping to End Addiction Long-term, and nobody knows more than the people in this room how challenging and important that really is. We’ve heard a little bit about the great promise of our research and some of the advances that are coming through our research pipeline, new treatments, new guidance for clinicians and caregivers. I want everyone to know that we want to work with you. By working together, I’m confident that we will tailor these new advances to meet the individual needs of the patients and populations that we serve.
Tabak: Nora, what would you like to add?
Volkow: This afternoon, I met with two parents who told me the story of how they lost their daughter to an overdose. They showed me pictures of this fantastic girl, along with her drawings. Whenever we think about overdose deaths in America, the sheer number—75,000—can make us indifferent. But when you can focus on one person and feel the love surrounding that life, you remember the value of this work.
Like in COVID, substance use disorders are a painful problem that we’re all experiencing in some way. They may have upset our lives. But they may have brought us together and, in many instances, brought out the best that humans can do. The best, to me, is caring for one another and taking the responsibility of helping those that are most vulnerable. I believe that science has a purpose. And here we have a purpose: to use science to bring solutions that can prevent and treat those suffering from substance use disorders.
Tabak: Thanks to both of you for this enlightening conversation.
References:
[1] Drug overdose deaths, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, February 22, 2022.
[2] Trends in drug overdose deaths among US adolescents, January 2010 to June 2021. Friedman J. et al. JAMA. 2022 Apr 12;327(14):1398-1400.
Links:
Video: Evening Plenary with NIH’s Lawrence Tabak, Nora Volkow, and Rebecca Baker (Rx and Illicit Drug Summit 2022)
SAMHSA’s National Helpline (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, MD)
Opioids (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
Fentanyl (NIDA)
Helping to End Addiction Long-term®(HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
Rebecca Baker (HEAL/NIH)
Nora Volkow (NIDA)
Discussing Nation’s Opioid Crisis at Rx and Illicit Drug Summit
Posted on by Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D.
Analysis of Death Records Shows Growing Disparities in Opioid Epidemic
Posted on by Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D.
Based on the most recent data, about 100,000 people now die in the United States from drug overdoses over the course of a year, about half of them from synthetic opioids and primarily fentanyl [1,2]. That’s more than a 30 percent increase over 2019 levels, and a reminder that the exact causes of these tragic overdoses continue to evolve over time, including from changes in how people use drugs.
Now, an NIH-funded study provides a detailed look at one shift in drug use: overdose deaths involving some combination of opioids and stimulant drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine. These latest findings on the nation’s opioid epidemic, from a thorough analysis of death certificate data over a decade and up to the start of the pandemic, showed an alarming rise in overdose deaths from combined opioids and stimulants in all parts of the country.
The data also reveal extremely troubling racial disparities. Opioid/stimulant deaths among Black Americans have risen at more than three times the rate seen among non-Hispanic white people, especially in Eastern states. In other parts of the country, there’s also been a disproportionate increase in these combination overdose deaths among Hispanic and Asian Americans.
The findings, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, suggest that efforts to prevent opioid overdoses, including wide distribution of naloxone, should target not only people who primarily use opioids but those who primarily use crack cocaine or other street drugs [3].
The new study comes from a team led by Tarlise Townsend, NYU Langone Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy, New York, and David Kline, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC. They wanted to dig deeper into the increase in combined stimulant/opioid overdose deaths observed over the last decade.
To do so, the researchers analyzed individual death certificate data for overdoses from the 2007-2019 National Center for Health Statistics. They grouped them by state as well as by race and ethnicity (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Asian American/Pacific Islander). They also analyzed separately deaths from opioids in combination with cocaine and those involving methamphetamine and other stimulants (MOS).
These national data showed that cocaine/opioid mortality increased 575 percent among Black people compared to 184 percent in white people. The pattern for methamphetamines and other stimulants combined with opioids showed an even starker and truly terrible pattern. MOS/opioid mortality rose by 16,200 percent in Black people versus 3,200 percent in white people.
The study uncovered some other noteworthy regional trends from 2007-2019, including:
• By 2019, rates of cocaine/opioid mortality in Black Americans were considerably higher than among white Americans in 47 of the 50 states.
• The largest disparity between Black Americans and white Americans was found in MOS/opioid mortality in the Midwest.
• MOS/opioid death rates among Black Americans increased 66 percent per year in the Northeast, 72 percent per year in the Midwest, and 57 percent in the South.
• In the South, deaths from cocaine and opioids grew 26 percent per year in Black Americans, 27 percent per year in Hispanic people, and 12 percent per year in non-Hispanic white people.
• MOS/opioid death rates among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders increased faster than in white people in the West and Northeast.
• MOS/opioid death rates also grew faster among Hispanic people than among white people in the West, Northeast, and upper Midwest.
The results show that the nature of overdose deaths vary considerably from state to state and even within the same region of the country. More study, however, is needed to understand fully the observed trends and their causes.
For instance, it’s not clear how often such opioid/stimulant deaths stem from intentional use of these drugs in combination versus growing contamination of stimulant drugs, such as cocaine, with synthetic fentanyl, which is the extremely potent and dangerous opioid that’s largely responsible for the recent uptick in stimulant/opioid overdose deaths.
As researchers work to get these answers, this study comes as a reminder that successfully tackling the opioid epidemic through NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative and other efforts will require a multi-pronged approach, including concerted efforts to improve prevention and treatment for opioid misuse and addiction. It also will be essential to ensure that such advances will reach those who are being hit hardest by the opioid epidemic, including minority and marginalized communities.
References:
[1] 12 month-ending provisional number of drug overdose deaths. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. January 1, 2022.
[2] Drug overdose deaths. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. March 3, 2021.
[3] Racial/ethnic and geographic trends in combined stimulant/opioid overdoses, 2007-2019. Townsend T, Kline D, Rivera-Aguirre A, Bunting AM, Mauro PM, Marshall BDL, Martins SS, Cerda M. American Journal of Epidemiology. 7 Feb 2022.
Links:
Drug Topics (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
Opioid Overdose Crisis (NIDA)
Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
Tarlise Townsend (NYU Langone, New York)
David Kline (Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC)
NIH Support: National Institute on Drug Abuse
U.S. Surgeon General on Emotional Well-Being and Fighting the Opioid Epidemic
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
From September 2019 to September 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported nearly 90,000 overdose deaths in the United States. These latest data on the nation’s opioid crisis offer another stark reminder that help is desperately needed in communities across the land. NIH’s research efforts to address the opioid crisis have been stressed during the pandemic, but creative investigators have come up with workarounds like wider use of telemedicine to fill the gap.
Much of NIH’s work on the opioid crisis is supported by the Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative. Recently, the more-than 500 investigators supported by HEAL came together virtually for their second annual meeting to discuss the initiative’s latest research progress and challenges.
As part of the meeting, I had a conversation with Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General. Dr. Murthy served as the 19th U.S. Surgeon General under the Obama Administration and was recently confirmed as the 21st Surgeon General under the Biden Administration. In his first term as America’s Doctor, in which I had the privilege of working with him, Dr. Murthy created initiatives to tackle our country’s most urgent public health issues, including addiction and the opioid crisis. He also issued the nation’s first Surgeon General’s Report on addiction, presenting the latest scientific data and issuing a call to action to recognize addiction as a chronic illness—and not a moral failing.
In 2016, Dr. Murthy sent a letter to 2.3 million healthcare professionals urging them to join a movement to tackle the opioid epidemic. This was the first time in the history of the office that a Surgeon General had issued a letter calling the medical profession to action on this issue. In 2017, Dr. Murthy focused his attention on chronic stress and isolation as prevalent problems with profound implications for health, productivity, and happiness.
Our conversation during the HEAL meeting took place via videoconference, with the Surgeon General connecting from Washington, D.C., and me linking in from my home in Maryland. Here’s a condensed transcript of our chat:
Collins: Welcome, Dr. Murthy. We’ve known each other for a few years, and I know that you’ve talked extensively about the national epidemic of loneliness. What have you learned about loneliness and how it affects our emotional wellbeing?
Murthy: Thanks, Francis. Loneliness and perceived social isolation are profound challenges for communities struggling with addiction, including opioid use disorders. I had no real background in these issues when I started as Surgeon General in 2014. I was educated by people I met all across the country, who in their own way would tell me their stories of isolation and loneliness. It’s a common stressor, especially for those who struggle with opioid use disorders. Stress can be a trigger for relapse. It’s also connected with overdose attempts and overdose deaths.
But loneliness is bigger than addiction. It is not just a bad feeling. Loneliness increases our risk of anxiety and depression, dementia, cardiac disease, and a host of other conditions. However you cut it, addressing social isolation and loneliness is an important public-health issue if we care about addiction, if we care about mental health—if we care about the physical wellbeing of people in our country.
Collins: Vivek, you made the diagnosis of an epidemic of American loneliness back before COVID-19 came along. With the emergence of COVID-19 a little more than a year ago, it caused us to isolate ourselves even more. Now that you’re back as Surgeon General and seeing the consequences of the worst pandemic in 103 years, is loneliness even worse now than before the pandemic?
Murthy: I think there are many people for whom that sense of isolation and loneliness has increased during the pandemic. But the pandemic has been a very heterogenous experience. There are some people who have found themselves more surrounded by their extended family or a close set of friends. That has been, in many ways, a luxury. For many people who are on the frontlines as essential workers, whose jobs don’t permit them to just pick up and leave and visit extended family, these have been very stressful and isolating times.
So, I am worried. And I’m particularly worried about young people—adolescents and young adults. They already had high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide before the pandemic, and they’re now struggling with loneliness. I mention this because young people are so hyperconnected by technology, they seem to be on TikTok and Instagram all the time. They seem to be chatting with their friends constantly, texting all the time. How could they feel isolated or lonely?
But one of the things that has become increasingly clear is what matters when it comes to loneliness is the quality of your human connections, not the quantity. For many young people that I spoke to while traveling across the country, they would say that, yes, we’re connected to people all the time. But we don’t necessarily feel like we can always be ourselves in our social media environment. That’s where comparison culture is at its height. That’s where we feel like our lives are always falling short, whether it’s not having a fancy enough job, not having as many friends, or not having the right clothing or other accessories.
We talk a lot about resilience in our country. But how do we develop more resilient people? One of the keys is to recognize that social connections are an important source of resilience. They are our natural buffers for stress. When hard things happen in our lives, so many of us just instinctively will pick up the phone to call a friend. Or we’ll get into the car and go visit a member of our family or church. The truth is, if we want to build a society that’s healthier mentally and physically, that is more resilient, and that is also more happy and fulfilled, we have to think about how we build a society that is more centered around human connection and around relationships.
My hope is that one of the things we will reevaluate is building a people-centered society. That means designing workplaces that allow people to prioritize relationships. It means designing schools that equip our children with social and emotional learning tools to build healthy relationships from the earliest ages. It means thinking about public policy, not from just the standpoint of financial impact but in terms of how it impacts communities and how it can fracture communities.
We have an opportunity to do that now, but it won’t happen by default. We have to think through this very proactively, and it starts with our own lives. What does it mean for each of us to live a truly people-centered life? What decisions would we make differently about work, about how we spend time, about where we put our attention and energy?
Collins: Those are profound and very personal words that I think we can all relate to. Let me ask you about another vulnerable population that we care deeply about. There are 50 million Americans who are living with chronic pain, invisible to many, especially during the pandemic, for whom being even more isolated has been particularly rough—and who are perhaps in a circumstance where getting access to medical care has been challenging. As Surgeon General, are you also looking closely at the folks with chronic pain?
Murthy: You’re right, the populations that were more vulnerable pre-pandemic have really struggled during this pandemic—whether that’s getting medications for treatment, needed counseling services, or taking part in social support groups, which are an essential part of the overall treatment approach and staying in recovery. It’s a reminder of how urgent it is for us, number one, to improve access to healthcare in our country. We’ve made huge strides in this area, but millions are still out of reach of the healthcare system.
A potential silver lining of this pandemic is telemedicine, which has extraordinary potential to improve and extend access to services for people living with substance use disorders. In 2016, I remember visiting a small Alaskan fishing village that you can only get to by boat or plane. In that tiny village of 150 people, I walked into the small cabin where they had first-aid supplies and provided some basic medical care. There I saw a small monitor mounted on the wall and a chair. They told me that the monitor is where people, if they’re dealing with a substance use disorder, come and sit to get counseling services from people in the lower 48 states. I was so struck by that. To know that telemedicine could reach this remote Alaskan village was really extraordinary.
I think the pandemic has accelerated our adoption of telemedicine by perhaps five years or more. But we must sustain this momentum not only with investment in broadband infrastructure, but with other things that seem mundane, like the reimbursement structure around telemedicine. I talk to clinicians now who say they are seeing some private insurers go back on reimbursement for telemedicine because the pandemic is starting to get better. But the lesson learned is not that telemedicine should go away; it’s that we should be integrating it even more deeply into the practice of medicine.
The future of care, I believe, is bringing care closer to where people are, integrating it into their workflow, bringing it to their homes and their neighborhoods. I saw this so clearly for many of the patients I cared for who fell into that category of being in vulnerable populations. They were working two, three jobs, trying to take care of their children at the same time. Having a conversation with them about how they could find time to go to the gym was almost a laughable matter because they were literally dealing with issues of survival and putting food on the table for their kids. As a society we have to do more to understand the lives of people who fall into those categories and provide services that bring what they need to them, as opposed to expecting them to come to us.
If we continue in a purely fee-for-service-based environment where people must go multiple places to get their care, we will not ultimately get care to the vulnerable populations that have struggled the most and that are hoping that we will do better this time around. I think we can. I think we must. And I think COVID may just be, in part, the impetus to move forward in a different way that we need.
Collins: Let’s talk a minute about the specifics of the opioid crisis. If we’re going to move this crisis in the right direction, are there particular areas that you would say we really need more rigorous data in order to convince the medical care system—both the practitioners and the people deciding about reimbursement—that these are things we must do?
Murthy: There are a few areas that come to mind, and I’ve jotted them down. It is so important for us to do research with vulnerable populations, recognizing they often get left out. It’s essential that we conduct studies specifically for these populations so that we can better target interventions to them.
The second area is prevention programs. People want to prevent illnesses. I have not met anybody anywhere in the United States who has said, “I’d rather get diabetes first and treat it versus prevent it in the first place.” As silly as that might sound, it is the exact opposite of how we finance health interventions in our country. We put the lion’s share of our dollars in treatment. We do very little in prevention.
The third piece is the barriers faced by primary-care clinicians, who we want to be at the heart of providing a lot of these treatment services. I’ll tell you, just from my conversations with primary-care docs around the country, they worry about not having enough for their patients in the way of social work and social support services in their offices.
Finally, it has become extraordinarily clear to me that social support is one of the critical elements of treatment for substance use disorders. That it is what helps keep people in recovery. I think about the fact that many people I met who struggle with opioid use disorders had family members who were wondering how they could be helpful. They weren’t sure. They said, “Should I just keep badgering my relative to go to treatment? Should I take a tough love approach? What should I do to be helpful?”
This actually is one of the most pressing issues: social support is most often going to come from family, from friends, and from other community members. So, being able to guide them in an evidence-based way about what measures, what forms actually can be helpful to people struggling with opioid use disorders could also be immensely helpful to a group that is looking to provide assistance and support, but often is struggling to figure out how best to do that.
Collins: Vivek, you were focused as Surgeon General in the Obama Administration on the importance of changing how America thinks about addiction—that it is not a moral failing but a chronic illness that has to be treated with compassion, urgency, skill, and medical intervention. Are we getting anywhere with making that case?
Murthy: Sometimes people shy away from addressing the stigma around addiction because it feels too hard to address. But it is one of the most important issues to address. If people are still feeling judged for their disorders, they are not going to feel comfortable coming forward and getting treatment. And others will hesitate to step up and provide support.
I will always remember the young couple I met in Oklahoma who had lost their son to an opioid overdose. They told me that previously in their life whenever they had a struggle—a job loss or other health issue in the family—neighbors would come over, they would drop off food, they would visit and sit with them in their living room and hold their hands to see if they were okay. When their son died after opioid use disorder, it was silent. Nobody came over. It’s a very common story of how people feel ashamed, they feel uncomfortable, they don’t know quite what to say. So they stay away, which is the worst thing possible during these times of great pain and distress.
I do think we have made progress in the last few years. There are more people stepping forward to tell their stories. There are more people and practitioners who are embracing the importance of talking to their patients about substance use disorders and getting involved in treating them. But the truth is, we still have many people in the country who feel ashamed of what they’re dealing with. We still have many family members who feel that this is a source of shame to have a loved one struggling with a substance use disorder.
To me, this is much bigger than substance use disorders. This is a broader cultural issue of how we think about strength and vulnerability. We have defined strength in modern society as the loudest voice in the room or the person with the most physical prowess, the person who’s aggressive in negotiations, and the person who’s famous.
But I don’t think that’s what strength really is. Strength is so often displayed in moments of vulnerability when people have the courage to open up and be themselves. Strength is defined by the people who have the courage to display love, patience, and compassion, especially when it’s difficult. That’s what real strength is.
One of my hopes is that, as a society, we can ultimately redefine strength. As we think about our children and what we want them to be, we cannot aspire for them to be the loudest voice in the room. We can aspire for them to be the most-thoughtful, the most-welcoming, the most-inviting, the most-compassionate voice in the room.
If we truly want to be a society that’s grounded in love, compassion, and kindness, if we truly recognize those as the sources of strength and healing, we have to value those in our workplaces. They have to be reflected in our promotion systems. We have to value them in the classroom. Ultimately, we’ve got to build our lives around them.
That is a broader lesson that I took from all of the conversations I’ve had with people who struggle with opioid use disorders. What I took was, yes, we need medication and assisted treatment; yes, we need counseling services; yes, we need social services and wraparound services and recovery services. But the engine that will drive our healing is fundamentally the love and compassion that come from human relationships.
We all have the ability to heal because we all have the ability to be kind and to love one another. That’s the lesson that it took me more than two decades to learn in medicine. More important than any prescription that I could write is the compassion that I could extend to patients simply by listening, by showing up, by being present in their lives. We all have that ability, regardless of what degrees follow our name.
Collins: Vivek, this has been a wonderful conversation. We are fortunate to have you as our Surgeon General at this time, when we need lots of love and compassion.
Murthy: Thank you so much, Francis.
Links:
Opioids (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
Opioid Overdose Crisis (NIDA)
Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C.)
Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
Video: Emotional Well Being and the Power of Connections to Fight the Opioid Epidemic (HEAL/NIH)
After Opioid Overdose, Most Young People Aren’t Getting Addiction Treatment
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Drug overdoses continue to take far too many lives, driven primarily by the opioid crisis (though other drugs, such as methamphetamine and cocaine, are also major concerns). While NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative is taking steps to address this terrible crisis, new findings serve as another wake-up call that young people battling opioid addiction need a lot more assistance to get back on the right track.
In a study of more than 3,600 individuals, aged 13-22, who survived an opioid overdose, an NIH-funded team found that only about one-third received any kind of follow-up addiction treatment [1]. Even more troubling, less than 2 percent of these young people received the gold standard approach of medication treatment.
The findings reported in JAMA Pediatrics come from Rachel Alinsky, an adolescent medicine and addiction medicine fellow at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Baltimore. She saw first-hand the devastating toll that opioids are taking on our youth.
Alinsky also knew that nationally more than 4,000 fatal opioid overdoses occurred in people between the ages of 15 and 24 in 2016 [2]. Likewise, rates of nonfatal opioid overdoses for teens and young adults also have been escalating, leading to more than 7,000 hospitalizations and about 28,000 emergency department visits in 2015 alone [3].
In the latest study, Alinsky wanted to find out whether young people who overdose receive timely treatment to help prevent another life-threatening emergency. According to our best evidence-based guidelines, timely treatment for youth with an opioid addiction should include medication, ideally along with behavioral interventions.
That’s because opioid addiction rewires the brain—will power alone is simply not sufficient to achieve and sustain recovery. After one overdose, the risk of dying from another one rises dramatically. So, it is critical to get those who survived an overdose into effective treatment right away.
Alinsky and her team dove into the best-available dataset, consisting of data on more than 4 million mostly low-income adolescents and young adults who’d been enrolled in Medicaid for at least six months in 16 states. The sample included 3,606 individuals who’d been seen by a doctor and diagnosed with opioid poisoning. A little over half of them were female; most were non-Hispanic whites.
Heroin accounted for about a quarter of those overdoses. The rest involved other opioids, most often prescription painkillers. However, the researchers note that some overdoses attributed to heroin might have been caused by the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. The use of fentanyl, often mixed with heroin, was on the rise in the study’s final years, but it was rarely included in drug tests at the time.
Less than 20 percent of young people in the sample received a diagnosis of opioid use disorder, or a problematic pattern of opioid use resulting in impairment or distress. What’s more, in the month following an overdose, few received the current standard for addiction treatment, which should include behavioral therapy and treatment with one of three drugs: buprenorphine, naltrexone, or methadone.
Drilling a little deeper into the study’s findings:
• 68.9 percent did not receive addiction treatment of any kind.
• 29.3 percent received behavioral health services alone.
• Only 1.9 percent received one of three approved medications for opioid use disorder.
It’s been estimated previously that teens and young adults are one-tenth as likely as adults 25 years and older to get the recommended treatment for opioid use disorder [4]. How can that be? The researchers suggest that one factor might be inexperience among pediatricians in diagnosing and treating opioid addiction. They also note that, even when the problem is recognized, doctors sometimes struggle to take the next step and connect young people with addiction treatment facilities that are equipped to provide the needed treatment to adolescents.
As this new study shows, interventions designed to link teens and young adults with the needed recovery treatment and care are desperately needed. As we continue to move forward in tackling this terrible crisis through the NIH’s HEAL Initiative and other efforts, finding ways to overcome such systemic barriers and best engage our youth in treatment, including medication, will be essential.
References:
[1] Receipt of addiction treatment after opioid overdose among Medicaid-enrolled adolescents and young adults. Alinsky RH, Zima BT, Rodean J, Matson PA, Larochelle MR, Adger H Jr, Bagley SM, Hadland SE. JAMA Pediatr. 2020 Jan 6:e195183.
[2] Overdose death rates. National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIH.
[3] 2018 annual surveillance drug-related risks and outcomes—United States: surveillance special report. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
[4] Medication-assisted treatment for adolescents in specialty treatment for opioid use disorder. Feder KA, Krawczyk N, Saloner B. J Adolesc Health. 2017 Jun;60(6):747-750.
Links:
Opioid Overdose Crisis (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
Opioid Overdose (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta)
Decisions in Recovery: Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, MD)
Rachel Alinsky (Johns Hopkins University Children’s Center, Baltimore)
Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
NIH Support: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; National Institute on Drug Abuse
Easier Access to Naloxone Linked to Fewer Opioid Deaths
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
A few weeks ago, I was pleased to take part in the announcement of NIH’s HEALing Communities Study in four states hard hit by the opioid epidemic. This study will test a comprehensive, evidence-based approach—which includes the wide distribution of naloxone to reverse overdoses—with the aim of reducing opioid-related deaths in selected communities by 40 percent over three years.
That’s a very ambitious goal. So, I was encouraged to read about new findings that indicate such reductions may be within our reach if society implements a number of key changes. Among those is the need to arm friends, family members, and others with the ability to save lives from opioid overdoses. Between 2013 and 2016, nine states instituted laws that give pharmacists direct authority to dispense naloxone to anyone without a prescription. However, the impact of such changes has remained rather unclear. Now, an NIH-funded analysis has found that within a couple of years of these new laws taking effect, fatal opioid overdoses in these states fell significantly [1].
The misuse and overuse of opioids, which include heroin, fentanyl, and prescription painkillers, poses an unprecedented public health crisis. Every day, more than 130 people in the United States die from opioid overdoses [2]. Not only are far too many families losing their loved ones, this crisis is costing our nation tens of billions of dollars a year in lost productivity and added expenses for healthcare, addiction treatment, and criminal justice.
Opioid overdoses lead to respiratory arrest. If not reversed in a few minutes, this will be fatal. In an effort to address this crisis, the federal government and many states have pursued various strategies to increase access to naloxone, which is a medication that can quickly restore breathing in a person overdosing on opioids. Naloxone, which can be delivered via nasal spray or injection, works by binding opioid receptors to reverse or block the effect of opioids. The challenge is to get naloxone to those who need it before it’s too late.
In some states, a physician still must prescribe naloxone. In others, naloxone access laws (NALs) have given pharmacists the authority to supply naloxone without a doctor’s orders. But not all NALs are the same.
Some NALs, including those in Alaska, California, Connecticut, Idaho, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Carolina, give pharmacists direct authority to dispense naloxone to anyone who requests it. But NALs in certain other states only give pharmacists indirect authority to dispense naloxone to people enrolled in certain treatment programs, or who meet other specific criteria.
In the new analysis, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, a team that included Rahi Abouk, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, and Rosalie Liccardo Pacula and David Powell, RAND Corp., Arlington, VA, asked: Do state laws to improve naloxone access lead to reductions in fatal overdoses involving opioids? The answer appears to be “yes,” but success seems to hinge on the details of those laws.
The evidence shows that states allowing pharmacists direct authority to dispense naloxone to anyone have seen large increases in the dispensing of the medication. In contrast, states granting pharmacists’ only indirect authority to dispense naloxone have experienced little change.
Most importantly, the research team found that states that adopted direct authority NALs experienced far greater reductions in opioid-related deaths than states with indirect authority NALs or no NALs. Specifically, the analysis showed that in the year after direct authority NALs were enacted, fatal opioid overdoses in those states fell an average of 27 percent, with even steeper declines in ensuing years. Longer-term data are needed, and, as in all observational studies of this sort, one must be careful not to equate correlation with causation. But these findings are certainly encouraging.
There were some other intriguing trends. For instance, the researchers found that states that allow pharmacists to dispense naloxone without a prescription also saw an increase in the number of patients treated at emergency departments for nonfatal overdoses. This finding highlights the importance of combining strategies to improve naloxone access with other proven interventions and access to medications aimed to treat opioid addiction. Integration of all possible interventions is exactly the goal of the HEALing Communities Study mentioned above.
Successfully tackling the opioid epidemic will require a multi-pronged approach, including concerted efforts and research advances in overdose reversal, addiction treatment, and non-addictive pain management . As I’ve noted before, we cannot solve the opioid addiction and overdose crisis without finding innovative new ways to treat pain. The NIH is partnering with pharmaceutical industry leaders to accelerate this process, but it will take time. The good news based on this new study is that, with thoughtful strategies and policies in place, many of the tools needed to help address this epidemic and save lives may already be at our disposal.
References:
[1] Association Between State Laws Facilitating Pharmacy Distribution of Naloxone and Risk of Fatal Overdose. Abouk R, Pacula RL, Powell D. JAMA Intern Med. 2019 May 6
[2] Opioid Overdose Crisis. National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH. Updated January 2019.
Links:
HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-Term) Initiative (NIH)
Naloxone for Opioid Overdose (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
NIH Support: National Institute on Drug Abuse
All Scientific Hands on Deck to End the Opioid Crisis
Posted on by Dr. Nora Volkow and Dr. Francis Collins
In 2015, 2 million people had a prescription opioid-use disorder and 591,000 suffered from a heroin-use disorder; prescription drug misuse alone cost the nation $78.5 billion in healthcare, law enforcement, and lost productivity. But while the scope of the crisis is staggering, it is not hopeless.
We understand opioid addiction better than many other drug use disorders; there are effective strategies that can be implemented right now to save lives and to prevent and treat opioid addiction. At the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in Atlanta last April, lawmakers and representatives from health care, law enforcement, and many private stakeholders from across the nation affirmed a strong commitment to end the crisis.
Research will be a critical component of achieving this goal. Today in the New England Journal of Medicine, we laid out a plan to accelerate research in three crucial areas: overdose reversal, addiction treatment, and pain management [1].
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