Nearly half of those deaths
involved a prescription opioid.
Forty percent of these deaths
involved a prescription opioid.
In addition to 67.8 percent of overdoses
involving prescription opioids, researchers found heroin accounted for 16.1 percent of overdoses, unspecified opioids for 13.4 percent and multiple opioid types in 2.7 percent of overdoses.
Of the 20.5 million Americans over the age of 12 who had a substance use disorder in 2015, 2 million
involved prescription opioids.
Not exact matches
In 2011, 31 % of
prescription -
opioid - related overdose deaths
involved these two kinds of drugs used together, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Over time, that decline may translate to a drop in overdose deaths, since
prescription or illicit
opioids were
involved in 66 % of all lethal overdoses in 2016, according to CDC data.
New York city is the latest U.S. city to bring a lawsuit against Purdue Pharmaceutical and other companies
involved in manufacturing and distributing
prescription painkillers, known as
opioids.
Overdoses
involving opioids killed more than 28,000 people in the nation in 2014, and more than half of those deaths were from
prescription opioids.
«Orthopaedic patients can experience a tremendous amount of pain with acute injuries and chronic conditions, and the treatment plan may
involve opioid prescriptions for relief of discomfort,» says Dr. Mir.
In the last 15 years, the number of Americans receiving an
opioid prescription and the number of deaths
involving overdoses have roughly quadrupled, according to the CDC.
For Dr. Mark Edlund, a senior public health analyst at RTI International who was also not
involved in the study, it adds to a growing and worrisome body of evidence that people with mental health disorders who are at higher risk for abusing
opioids are also more likely to receive
opioid prescriptions.
Nearly half of all
opioid overdose deaths
involved a
prescription drug.