National Institute of Drug Addiction director Dr. Nora Volkow offers some of the latest updates around opioid crisis.
In 2023, only 14.6% of people with a Substance Use Disorder received treatment, and only 18% of people with an opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication. OUD medications reduced fatal overdoses in prisons and jails by 32%. Access to buprenorphine reduced recidivism by 32%. Fatal overdoses dropped while overdoses continued to rise among minority groups.
The U.S. saw a 1-year decline from 84,000 to 81,000 in 2023. While the marginal drop is encouraging, we cannot rest on this achievement or count on it to continue. Too many people are still dying, and much more needs to be done. In this article, Dr. Sara Wakeman explains how Buprenorphine can further reduce the opioid crisis.
In this article by The Atlantic, journalist Ethan Brooks breaks down why “we have an epidemic that kills over 80,000 people every year; a real-world-proven, effective medication to treat that epidemic; a coordinated federal effort to get that medication to the people who need it; and nothing—a chasm between policy and treatment and crisis, into which hundreds of people disappear every day.”
A small study showed that nearly 90% of patients rotated to tiny doses of buprenorphine had the same pain relief as usual (full agonist) opioids, though at 1/60th the opioid milligram equivalent (OME). This study will help patients switch from full-agonist opioids to the much safer partial-agonist opioid buprenorphine.
Just a few years ago, only a small percentage of jails were providing MOUD to the general population with OUD. Today, about 30% of jails provide buprenorphine and about 20% of jails provide methadone, two of the three FDA-approved MOUDs. Agonist medications— methadone and buprenorphine—have the strongest evidence supporting their use.
The CDC’s 2016 opioid guideline recommended that daily opioid doses not exceed 90 morphine milligram equivalents (MME). Although voluntary, the guideline was seized upon by other federal agencies and state legislatures to justify draconian new laws and regulations that limited opioid doses to 90 MME or less. No such limits have been set for buprenorphine. However, few doctors in the U.S. prescribe buprenorphine for pain, despite recent studies demonstrating its efficacy and international recognition that it is an effective analgesic.
NIH-funded study suggests need to reevaluate opioid addiction treatment recommendations in the era of fentanyl. These findings build upon accumulating evidence of the safety and efficacy of higher doses of buprenorphine. Studies have shown that more than 16 mg of buprenorphine is safe and well tolerated in people with opioid use disorder in emergency department and outpatient treatment settings.
Results from a multi-site clinical trial supported by the National Institutes of Health showed that less than 1% of people with opioid use disorder whose drug use includes fentanyl experienced withdrawal when starting buprenorphine in the emergency department. The findings, which appeared today in JAMA Network Open, are strong evidence that buprenorphine, a medication approved…
Partnerships have become crucial in helping people transition out of correction facilities with SUD treatment. For example, substance use disorder provider Groups Recover Together has partnered with several state correctional departments, including Indiana and Maine’s department of corrections (DOC), to provide transitional care and reentry services for individuals transitioning out of incarceration.
Treatment for opioid use disorder is limited by there not being enough people that offer medications for opioid use disorder,” said Brian Hurley, MD, MBA, president-elect of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). “Removal of the X waiver opens up the capability of prescribing to a much broader group of clinicians.