ISLAMAABAD, (Online) – New research study has found that in areas where prescriptions of opioids have decreased, the rates of suicide were also impacted and were not as high as expected.
The study, published this week in the American Journal of Psychiatry, comes as opioid-related overdoses have reached record highs.
The author of the study, and professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University, Dr. Mark Olfson (MD, MPH), said the study can help medical experts understand the risks of opioids and think bout how to prescribe pills safely.
“On the one hand, what these results, from a clinical perspective suggest, is that they underscore safety risks of opioids, and they reinforce the importance of safe and judicious prescribing of opioids and proper disposal of unused opioids,” Olfson said. “In managing patients with pain, It’s important that healthcare professionals consider whether adequate pain relief can be achieved with interventions first that don’t involve medications.”
More suicides may have occurred if opioids had continued to be commonly prescribed
Rather than looking at individualized data, the researchers focused on broader trends gleaned from national database data held by IQVIA alongside mortality statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics.
The team looked at data from 2009 to 2017. During that time they looked at rates of opioid prescriptions, rates specifically for high-dose opioids, and for the number of long-term prescriptions. Additionally they looked to see what the rate was of having multiple opioid prescribers.
