Research Highlight

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a communicable disease that could lead to liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma affecting baby boomers and all people who inject drugs (PWID) in particular. There are over 19,000 HCV-related deaths in the United States annually. HCV can be cured using direct-acting antivirals that can also reverse HCV-related liver injury. In 2012, the […]

Using a legislatively-mandated, integrated dataset, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health has published its first comprehensive look at the state’s opioid-related overdoses between 2011 and 2015. The dataset was created as part of 2015 “Chapter 55” legislation. It links information on an individual level across diverse state databases, including mental health data, jail and prison data, vital records, substance […]

A recent statistical brief from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) provides valuable information regarding patient characteristics for opioid-related inpatient stays and emergency department (ED) visits in the US and within 44 states and the District of Columbia. The brief comes from AHRQ’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), which is the largest all-payer encounter-level collection […]

The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that substance use disorders, comprising illicit drugs and alcohol use as well as smoking, cost the United States more than $740 billion per year. This includes the cost of crime, incarceration, lost productivity, and medical care. A recent study considered the economic consequences of heroin use specifically, finding […]

In response to the growing opioid epidemic in the United States, there is an increased focus on expanding evidence-based treatment using medications prescribed for substance use disorder, especially medications that can be prescribed in outpatient settings including buprenorphine and naltrexone. The Surgeon General’s report on facing addiction in America describes substance use disorders as chronic illnesses requiring […]

In a recent report, the CDC tracks drug overdose deaths in the US between 1999-2015.  The trends are not exactly what you might expect. Yes, given the recent press attention to the US opioid epidemic, the rates are predictable in that they are unacceptably high and increasing at a shocking rate. Age-adjusted drug overdose rates increased to 16.3 […]

In 2015, over 20,000 Americans died of an overdose related to prescription pain relievers; approximately 1 person every 26 minutes. A study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine highlights the correlation between emergency department prescribing practices and long-term prescription pain reliever use in Medicare patients. The research team from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health […]

To address the crisis of opioid misuse, abuse, and overdose, every state but Missouri has implemented a prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) that collects data from retail pharmacies on all dispensed controlled substances. PDMPs can help prescribers identify patients who might misuse or divert controlled substances, as well as patients who need substance abuse treatment. […]

The danger of that first prescription “Just in case,” the oral surgeon said, as he prescribed the opioid hydrocodone for my 17-year-old son, who just had his wisdom teeth out. “But you might try Motrin first,” he added. Not knowing what the next hours, or days, would bring, we filled the prescription for 20 pills. […]

It seems self-evident: one way to address the epidemic of opioid deaths is to make prescription opioids harder to misuse. OxyContin, for example, is especially dangerous when it is crushed for ingestion, inhalation, or injection. In 2010, the FDA approved a reformulated, abuse-deterrent version of OxyContin that made the pill difficult to crush or dissolve. […]

The US Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine issued a report in 1996 that set the standards for reporting of cost-effectiveness studies in the field, resulting in a rapid expansion of publications and establishment of similar national standards in other jurisdictions. Twenty years later, the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine has […]

The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured recently released an issue brief detailing the most costly outpatient drugs to Medicaid in 2014 and the first half of 2015. Using data from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the authors analyzed outpatient drug costs based on Medicaid spending (before rebates) to determine which drugs account […]