drugs
Coping with the Collision of Public Health Crises: COVID-19 and Substance Use Disorders
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
For the past half-dozen years, I’ve had the privilege of attending the Rx Drug and Heroin Abuse Summit. And I was counting on learning more about this national crisis this April in Nashville, where I was scheduled to take part in a session with Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. But because of the physical distancing needed to help flatten the deadly curve of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, it proved to be impossible for anyone to attend in person. Still, the summit did go on for almost three days—virtually!
Dr. Volkow and I took part by sharing a video of a recent conversation we had via videoconference. Since we couldn’t take live questions, we solicited some in advance. Here’s a condensed transcript highlighting portions of our dialogue that focused on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals struggling with substance abuse disorders, along with all those who are trying to help them.
VOLKOW: Hello, Francis. Nice to see you, virtually!
COLLINS: Nice to see you too. I’m in my home office here, where I’ve been pretty much for the last three weeks. I’ve been stepping outdoors to occasionally get a breath of fresh air, but trying to live up to all those recommendations about social distancing—or at least physical distancing. I’m trying to keep my social connections going, even if they’re electronic.
I think we’re all feeling this is a time of some stress for us at NIH. We are trying to do everything we can to address this COVID crisis and speed up the process of developing vaccines and therapeutics and all kinds of other things. How are you doing? What’s it like being sequestered back in your home space when you are somebody with so much energy?
VOLKOW: Francis, it’s not easy. I actually am very, very restless. We probably are all experiencing that anxiety of uncertainty, looking at the news and how devastating it is. But I think what makes it easier is if we can do something. Working with everything that we have to try to help others, I think, provides some relief.
COLLINS: Yes, we’re going to talk about that right now. In fact, let’s talk about the way in which this crisis, the global pandemic called COVID-19, is colliding with another public health crisis, which is that of substance use disorder. You recently wrote about this collision in an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine. What does this mean? What are some of the unique challenges that COVID-19 brings to people suffering from addiction?
VOLKOW: I’m glad you are bringing up this point because it’s one of the issues of greatest concern for all of us who are working in the field of substance use disorders. We had not yet been able to contain the epidemic of opioid fatalities, and then we were hit by this tsunami of COVID.
We immediately can recognize the unique challenges of COVID-19 for people having an addiction. Some of these are structural; the healthcare system is not prepared to take care of them. They relate also to stigma and social issues. The concept of social distancing makes such people even more vulnerable because it interferes with many of the support systems that can help them to reach recovery. And, on top of that, drugs themselves negatively influence human physiology, making one more vulnerable to getting infected and more vulnerable to worse outcomes. So that’s why there is tremendous concern about these two epidemics colliding with one another.
COLLINS: How has this influenced treatment delivery for people with substance use disorders, who are counting on that to be able to keep themselves from slipping backward?
VOLKOW: Well, that has been very challenging. We’re hearing from multiple sources that it’s become harder for patients to be able to access treatment. And that relates, for example, to access of medications for opioid use disorders, which are the main strategy—and the most effective one—that we have to prevent people from dying from overdoses.
Some clinics are decreasing the number of patients that they can take care of. The healthcare system is also much less able to initiate persons on buprenorphine. And because of social isolation, if you overdose, the likelihood that someone can rescue you with naloxone is much lower. We don’t yet have statistics on about how that’s influencing fatalities, but we are very concerned.
COLLINS: Nora, you are one of the lead persons for NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected all the grand research plans that we had put in place as part of our big vision of how NIH could help with the substance use disorder crisis?
VOLKOW: Well, $900 million had recently been deployed on research. That is incredibly meritorious, and some of that research had already started. Unfortunately, it has had to stop almost completely. Why? Because the research that’s relying on the healthcare system, for example, is no longer able to focus on research when they have other clinical needs to meet.
Also, research to bring medication-assisted treatments to prison inmates has stopped. Prisons are not allowing the researchers to go on site because they are closing the doors to outsiders, since they are places at high risk for the spread of COVID-19. Furthermore, some institutional review boards (IRBs) are actually closing, making it impossible to recruit patients for the clinical trials. So, most studies have come to a halt. The issue now is how can we become creative and use virtual technologies to advance some of the goals that we aim to achieve with the HEAL initiative.
COLLINS: Of course, this applies to many other areas of NIH-supported research. Most clinical trials, unless they’re for life-threating conditions, are pretty much in a state of hibernation. We can’t justify having people get out there in ways that might put them at risk of COVID-19. So, yes, it’s a tough time for clinical research all over. And that’s certainly what’s happened with the opioid use disorder problems. Still, I think our teams are really devoted to making sure they make the best of this time, doing things that they can do in terms of planning and setting up data systems.
Meanwhile, bring us up to date on what’s happened as far as the state of the opioid crisis. Are there trends there that we ought to look at for a minute?
VOLKOW: Yes, it’s important to actually keep our eyes on the epidemic, because it’s changing so very rapidly. It’s gone from prescription opioids to heroin to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. And what we have observed ramping up over the past two or three years is an increase in fatalities from the use of psychostimulant drugs.
For example, the number of deaths from methamphetamine has increased five-fold over a period of six years. Similarly, deaths from cocaine are going up. The reality is that people are now dying not just from opioids, but from mixtures of drugs and stimulant drugs, most notably methamphetamine.
COLLINS: So, what can we learn from what we’ve been doing about opioid addiction, and try to apply that to this emerging methamphetamine crisis?
VOLKOW: Unfortunately, we do not have effective medications to treat methamphetamine addiction like we do for opioid use disorders. We also do not have an overdose reversal like we have with naloxone. So, in that respect, it is more challenging.
COLLINS: People sometimes think we’re only focused on trying to treat the problems that we have now. What about prevention? One of the questions we received in our HEAL mailbox was: How can small town communities create an environment where addiction does not take root in the next generation of young people? I’m sure you want to talk about the rewarding power of social interactions, even though right now we’re being somewhat deprived of those, at least face-to-face.
VOLKOW: I’m glad you’re bringing up that question, Francis. Because when you asked at the start of our conversation about how I am doing, I sort of said, “Well, it’s not easy.” But the positive component was that sense that we have a shared mission: we can help others. And the lack of a sense of mission, the lack of a purpose in life, has been identified as one of the factors that make people more vulnerable to take drugs.
Feeling irrelevant, feeling that no one cares for you, is probably one of the most devastating feelings a human being can have. Epidemiological studies show that social isolation and neglect increase dramatically the risk of taking drugs, and, if you are trying to stop taking drugs, it increases that risk of relapse. And so that’s an issue right now of great concern. The challenge is “How do we provide social support for people at risk of substance abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic?”
Also, independent of COVID-19, I think that we as a nation have to face the concept that we have made America vulnerable to drugs because we have eroded that social sense of community. If we are to prevent future generations from getting addicted to drugs, we should build meaningful interactions between people. We should give each individual an opportunity to be part of a society that appreciates them. We do need each other in very, very fundamental ways. We need others for our well-being. If we don’t have that then we become very vulnerable.
COLLINS: Well, here’s one last question from the mailbox. Somebody notes that the “L” in HEAL stands for “long-term.” That is, Helping End Addiction Long-term. The questioner asks: “What’s our vision of a long-term goal and how do we imagine getting there?”
Mine very simply is that we would have an environment that would support people in productive ways, so that the distractions of things that turn out to be destructive are not so tempting, and that the possibility of having meaning in everyone’s life becomes greater.
Ironically, because of COVID-19, we are in the midst of a circumstance where economic distress is pressing on people and social distancing is being required. Seems like we’re going the wrong way. But if you look back in history, often these times of national crisis have been times when people did have the chance to survey what really matters around them, and perhaps to regain a sense of meaning and significance. That’s my maybe slightly over-optimistic view of the current era that we’re in.
Nora, what do you think?
VOLKOW: Francis, I will agree with you. I think that we need to create a society that provides social support and allows people to participate in a meaningful way. If we want to achieve integration of people into society, one of the things that we need to do urgently is remove the stigma of addiction because when you stigmatise someone, you are socially isolating them.
No one likes to be mistreated or discriminated against. So, if you are a person who is addicted and you are afraid of discrimination, you will not seek help. You will continue to isolate. So I think as we’re dealing with the opioid crisis, as we’re dealing with COVID-19, we cannot tolerate discrimination. We cannot tolerate stigma. And we need to be very creative to identify it and to create models that will actually eliminate it.
COLLINS: That’s a wonderful view of where we need to get to. All of these developments give me hope for our capacity to deal with this crisis by working together.
I want to say to all of you who’re listening to this in your own virtual spaces, how much I admire the work that you all are doing, in a selfless way, to try to help our nation deal with what has clearly been a terrible tragedy in far too many lives. I wish you all the best in continuing those creative and energetic efforts, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. NIH wants to be your ally. We want to be your source of information. We want to be your source of evidence for what works. We want to be your friends.
So, thank you for listening, and thank you, Nora Volkow, for joining me in this discussion today with all of the talent and leadership that you represent. I wish the best health to all of you. Stay safe and keep the progress going!
Links:
Video: Fireside Chat Between NIH, NIDA Heads Addresses COVID-19, the HEAL Initiative, and the Opioids Crisis (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
COVID-19 Resources (NIDA)
COVID-19: Potential Implications for Individuals with Substance Use Disorders, Nora’s Blog (NIDA)
NIDA Director outlines potential risks to people who smoke and use drugs during COVID-19 pandemic (NIDA)
Collision of the COVID-19 and Addiction Epidemics. Volkow ND. Ann Intern Med. 2 April 2020. [Epub ahead of print]
Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit, A 2020 Virtual Experience
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
Clinical Trials Bring Hope to Kids with Spinal Muscular Atrophy
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Faith Fortenberry
More than a decade ago, the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) launched a special project to accelerate the translation of basic scientific discoveries into new treatments for a rare and often fatal disease. Five-year-old Faith Fortenberry whom you see above is among the kids who may benefit from the success of this pioneering endeavor.
Faith was born with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a hereditary neurodegenerative disease that can affect movement, breathing, and swallowing. When the NIH project began, there was no treatment for SMA, but researchers had discovered that mutations in the SMN1 gene were responsible for the disorder. Such mutations cause a deficiency of SMN protein, leading to degeneration of neurons in the brain and spinal cord, and progressive muscle weakness throughout the body. The NIH effort supported research to discover ways of raising SMN levels in cells grown in lab dishes, and then worked closely with patient advocates and pharmaceutical companies to move the most promising leads into drug development and clinical testing.
Given the desperate need for SMA treatments and all of the scientific energy that’s been devoted to pursuing them, I’ve been following this field closely. So, I was very encouraged to learn recently about the promising results of human tests of not just one—but two—new treatments for SMA [1, 2].
Precision Medicine: Making Warfarin Safer
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Finding the right dose of the drug warfarin can be tricky, even with this standard test to measure how fast a person’s blood clots.
Credit: Thinkstock/jarun011
Every year, thousands of older Americans require emergency treatment to stop bleeding caused by taking warfarin, a frequently prescribed blood-thinning pill. My own mother received this drug in her later years, and her doctors encountered significant challenges getting the dose right. The problem is too much warfarin causes potentially serious bleeding, while too little leaves those who need the drug vulnerable to developing life-threatening clots in their legs or heart. The difference between too little and too much is distressingly small. But what if before writing a prescription, doctors could test for known genetic markers to help them gauge the amount of warfarin that a person should take?
Such tests have been available to doctors and patients for a few years, but they have not been widely used. The recent results of a national clinical trial offer some of the most convincing evidence that it’s time for that to change. In this study of 1,650 older adults undergoing elective hip or knee surgery, patients whose genetic makeup was used to help determine their dose of warfarin were less likely to suffer adverse events, including major bleeding. This trial marks an encouraging success story for the emerging field of pharmacogenomics, the study of how the variations in our genes affect our responses to medicines.
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