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Opioids and Painkillers Have a 40 Percent Addiction Rate

June 14, 2016 By Georgia Dawson Leave a Comment

Opioids lined up on a table.

Abusing prescription painkillers could lead to severe addiction to substances such as heroin.

STATES CHRONICLE – A research study performed in the United States in 2015 in regards to usage and storage of painkillers has revealed that all is not right in the world of medical opioids.

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription opioids-induced deaths have tripled between 1999 and 2014. The primary cause for this exponential increase is suspected to be the overprescribing of painkillers.

Opioids are often prescribed to patients when they are discharged from hospitals. Painkillers are a constant risk of addiction. A majority of heroin users have started out as opioid addicts.

A study in regards to personal opioid use, painkiller storage habits, and the sharing of medication was performed in 2015. The study surveyed 1,055 consenting adults who had received prescriptions for OxyContin or Vicodin in the previous year.

Even though an average time of six months had passed since their initial painkiller prescription, approximately 47 percent were still taking medical opioid at the time of the survey.

Nearly 60 percent of the surveyed subjects stated that they expected to have excess or leftover medication. In order to avoid the risk of addiction, excess opioids should be discarded. A minimal percentage of individuals actually did this.

Researchers established that close to 30 percent of survey subjects were given instructions on how to store and discard their medication from their doctors. 45 percent of the surveyed were made aware of such instructions from drug packaging or pharmacists.

Less than 10 percent of patients stored their prescription opioids in a securely locked location, during and after usage. Approximately 20 percent of patients said they kept their medicine in a “latched” location.

8 percent of study subjects shared their prescription painkillers with friends who were in need, 14 percent shared with relatives.

A staggering 45 percent gave their excess or leftover prescription opioids to people who they knew of having issues with managing pain, instead of discarding them.

A similar but different study which gathered data from 600,000 Medicare recipients revealed that close to 15 percent of all hospital patients are given an opioid prescription at discharge. Out of these 90,000 patients, close to 43 percent were using painkillers three months after their discharge.

The results of the study reveal that there is a clear issue in overprescribing pharmaceutical opioids but that also health care professionals must also make greater efforts in promoting the usage, storage, and disposal of painkillers.

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: addiction, Drugs, heroin, opioids, Oxy, OxyContin, painkillers, prescribed, prescription, study, Vicodin

Medication for teething babies can harm them, FDA states

June 27, 2014 By Deborah Cobing Leave a Comment

As a parent it is very tempting to try to diminish your infant’s pain at any cost, but the FDA announced today that lidocaine is dangerous for teething babies. The local anesthetic called viscous lidocaine must not be used to treat infants younger than two years old, without a strict medical indication. Best is to avoid at all medication for teething babies as long as the teething process goes normal.

The viscous lidocaine is usually administered to chemotherapy patients who often suffer from associated mouth ulcers. The numbing gel has been given to babies has produced incidents in 22 cases involving children under the age of three and a half. The FDA decided to require warning labels on all viscous lidocaine products confining the application of the drug to toddlers. Michael Cohen, President of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, warned that viscous lidocaine can produce swallowing difficulties and even chocking, besides affections to the heart and nervous system.

Other over-the-counter drugs are included in the warning: Anbesol, Hurricaine, Orajel, Baby Orajel, and Orabase. Although it is a low probability, the contained benzocaine can lead to methemoglobinemia, a fatal condition involving the alteration of oxygen in the blood stream. While trying to provide medication for teething babies without proper medical indication, there is a high risk of hurting them.

Avoiding medication for teething babies

Babies grow teeth and is a normal process. Some of the symptoms are low-fever, mild irritability and the urge to chew hard materials. According to Ethan Hausman, M.D, “FDA does not recommend any sort of drug, herbal or homeopathic medication or therapy for teething children“. Infants might show signs of pain during the teething process, so for well-intended parents, the FDA recommends the following actions:

The FDA warning regarding medication for teething babies

– “gently rub or massage the gums with your finger, and

– give your child a cool teething ring or a clean, wet, cool washcloth to chew on.”

It’s as simple as that. Well, it is so as you keep the infant under the regular supervision. Viscous lidocaine, even if it is available in the household from other family members, is too strong for infants’ organisms and should be used in their case only under strict medical supervision. Administering medication for teething babies should be avoided, if no specific medical indication, especially for lidocaine and benzocaine based drugs. Be a good friend and warn the other parents you know as well!

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: Drugs, FDA, medication for babies, medication for infants, teething babies

Home deaths from drug errors soar

February 27, 2014 By James Faulkner Leave a Comment

Deaths from medication mistakes at home, such as actor Heath Ledger‘s accidental overdose, rose dramatically during the past two decades, an analysis of U.S. death certificates finds.

Prescription drug abuse plays a role in the rise in fatalities, but it's unclear how much, researchers said.

Prescription drug abuse plays a role in the rise in fatalities, but it’s unclear how much, researchers said.

Prescription drug abuse plays a role in the rise in fatalities, but it’s unclear how much, researchers said.

The authors blame soaring home use of prescription painkillers and other potent drugs, which 25 years ago were given mainly inside hospitals.

“The amount of medical supervision is going down and the amount of responsibility put on the patient’s shoulders is going up,” said lead author David P. Phillips of the University of California, San Diego.

The findings, based on nearly 50 million U.S. death certificates, are published in The Archives of Internal Medicine. Of those, more than 224,000 involved fatal medication errors, including overdoses and mixing prescription drugs with alcohol or street drugs.

Deaths from medication mistakes at home increased from 1,132 deaths in 1983 to 12,426 in 2004. Adjusted for population growth, that amounts to an increase of more than 700 percent during that time.

In contrast, there was only a 5 percent increase in fatal medication errors away from home, including hospitals, and not involving alcohol or street drugs.

Abuse of prescription drugs plays a role, but it’s unclear how much. Valid prescriptions taken in error, especially narcotics such as methadone and oxycodone, account for a growing number of deaths, said experts who reviewed the study.

The increases coincided with changing attitudes about painkillers among doctors who now regard pain management as a key to healing. Multiple prescription drugs taken at once — like the sleeping pills, painkillers and anxiety drugs that killed “Dark Knight” star Ledger — also play a part, experts said.

“When we see overdoses, we’re seeing many more mixed drug overdoses,” said Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners and director of autopsies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Jentzen said autopsies are much more likely to include toxicology tests today than 25 years ago, which would contribute to finding more fatal medication errors as cause of death.

But Phillips said there were no significant increases in other poisonings, such as suicidal overdoses or homicides, so more testing doesn’t explain the huge increase. The analysis excluded suicides, homicides and deaths related to side effects.

The increase was steepest in death rates from mixing medicine with alcohol or street drugs at home; that death rate climbed from 0.04 per 100,000 people in 1983 to 1.29 per 100,000 people in 2004.

Many patients ignore the risk of mixing alcohol with prescriptions, said Cynthia Kuhn of Duke University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.

“They think, ‘Oh, one drink won’t hurt.’ Then they have three or four,” Kuhn said.

The increase in deaths was highest among baby boomers, people in their 40s and 50s.

“We’re sort of drug happy,” said boomer Dr. J. Lyle Bootman, the University of Arizona’s pharmacy dean, who was not involved in the research. “We have this general attitude that drugs can fix everything.”

People share prescriptions at an alarming rate, Bootman said. One recent study found 23 percent of people say they have loaned their prescription medicine to someone else and 27 percent say they have borrowed someone else’s prescription drugs.

Kenneth Kolosh, a statistics expert at the National Safety Council, praised the study but said improved attention to coding location on death certificates may account, in part, for the huge increases the researchers found.

Phillips countered that home deaths from any cause increased relatively little during the time period, so better coding doesn’t explain the change.

Michael R. Cohen, president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, said more states should require pharmacists to teach patients about dangerous drugs and insurers should pay pharmacists to do so.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: Dark Knight, Drugs, Heath Ledger, prescriptions

Cocaine use may up HIV infection risk

October 1, 2013 By Janet Vasquez Leave a Comment

With the spread of deadly AIDS viruses, HIV increasing unabated, use of cocaine may increase one’s vulnerability to the infection, a new study has warned.

According to the scientists, cocaine alters immune cells, called “quiescent CD4 T cells,” to render them more susceptible to the virus, and at the same time, to allow for increased proliferation of the virus.

“Such discovery can significantly improve the quality of life of drug users,” Vatakis said.

Study

For the study, scientists collected blood from healthy human donors and isolated quiescent CD4 T cells, and exposed them to cocaine and subsequently infected them with HIV.

cocaine
After the blood got infected, researchers monitored the progression of HIV’s life cycle and carried a comparative study of this progression against that of untreated cells.

They found that cocaine rendered this subset of CD4 T cells susceptible to HIV, resulting in significant infection and new virus production.

“The co-epidemics of illicit drug use and infectious disease are well documented, though typically this connection is thought to occur through lifestyle choices and increased exposure,” said John Wherry, Deputy Editor of the

Study was published in Journal of Leukocyte Biology.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: AIDS, Cocaine, Drug abuse, Drugs, HIV

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