Prescription opioids dispensed by the medical profession to children and adolescents have steadily fallen since 2012, according to an analysis of data from a large commercial insurance provider and published in the latest edition of JAMA Pediatrics, a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association.
At the start of 2017, an average of 2 out of every 1,000 children and adolescents received an outpatient opioid prescription in any given month, the study said. In 2004, 3 out of every 1,000 children and adolescents were prescribed opioids. That rose to 4 per 1,000 between 2009 to 2012. There was also a fall in the long-term opioid prescription use (three or more consecutive months).
The analysis includes all oral opioids used for pain. Cough suppressants and individuals with a health-care claim associated with a cancer diagnosis were excluded. Researchers cautioned that data for this analysis came from one single large commercial insurance provider, and opioid dispensing rates may differ in other populations and settings.
Still, this decrease reflects overall trends. The total number of prescriptions dispensed peaked in 2012, totaling more than 255 million, and a prescribing rate of 81.3 prescriptions per 100 persons. The prescribing rate has since fallen to the lowest in more than 10 years at 58.7 prescriptions per 100 persons (equivalent to approximately 191 million prescriptions).
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Prescription rates vary across the country, however. “In 2017, prescribing rates continue to remain very high in certain areas across the country,” according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. While the overall opioid prescribing rate reached the lowest rate in a decade last year, “some counties had rates that were seven times higher than that.”
Since the 1990s, when the amount of opioids prescribed to patients of all ages began to grow, the number of overdoses and fatalities from prescription opioids has also increased, according to the CDC said. But as the number of opioids prescribed for pain has increased, it said, the amount of pain that Americans have reported has not.
Last week, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said people still need an alternative to the pain medications. “Too many folks around the country are patting themselves on the back for their plummeting prescribing rates, but 62% of people who inject drugs say that they either got started or continue doing drugs because of chronic pain,” he said.
An estimated 2.1 million people in the U.S. are battling opioid addiction. Since 2010, the number of opioid overdose deaths doubled to 42,000 in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The rate of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2015 was more than 2.5 times the rate in 1999, partly due to a fall in the price of heroin and accessibility to prescription drugs.
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