Credit: CC0 Public Domain Use of prescription opioids in the United States has not substantially declined over the last decade, despite increased attention to opioid abuse and awareness of their risks, finds a study published by The BMJ today. The results show that, although opioid use and average dose of opioids levelled off after a […]
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain Patients who received antibiotics for respiratory tract infections had significantly shorter telemedicine encounters than those in which nonantibiotics were prescribed. A brief research report is published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Outpatient respiratory tract infections rarely require antibiotics, yet these agents are frequently prescribed. Physicians may think that prescribing antibiotics is […]
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain A study led by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health has found that letters targeting high prescribers of Seroquel (quetiapine), an antipsychotic with potentially harmful side effects in the elderly, significantly reduced the number of prescriptions for patients in Medicare. The results showed that peer comparison letters led to statistically […]
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain Among convicted offenders, receiving methadone is associated with lower rates of death from external and non-external causes, according to new research published this week in PLOS Medicine by Angela Russolillo of Simon Fraser University, Canada, and colleagues. Deaths caused by opioids are rising acutely throughout North America and individuals with criminal […]
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain A Philadelphia law firm has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against a number of opioid manufacturers, alleging that they are responsible for the medical needs of babies exposed to opioids before birth. John Weston, the attorney at Sacks Weston Diamond who brought the suit Friday on behalf of an anonymous baby […]
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain Products containing the withdrawn blood pressure drug valsartan are not associated with a markedly increased short term risk of cancer, finds an expedited analysis published by The BMJ today. The findings provide reassuring interim evidence about the risk of cancer in patients treated with valsartan products, but the authors say further […]
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Credit: Canadian Light Source Considering what little progress has been made finding drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, Maikel Rheinstädter decided to come at the problem from a totally different angle—perhaps the solution lay not with the peptide clusters known as senile plaques typically found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, but with the surrounding brain […]
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain The Trump administration on Thursday released a safety training video for emergency responders that aims to dispel myths about the risks of minor exposure to fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid. “One myth is that touching any amount of fentanyl is likely to cause severe illness or injury or even death. And […]
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Karanik yimpat/Shutterstock”> Around half of prisoners have a substance dependence. Credit: Karanik yimpat/Shutterstock Prisons and drug use are closely linked. Two-thirds of Australian prisoners report using illicit drugs in the 12 months before they entered prison, compared with 12% of the general population in the previous 12 months. Around half of prisoners are likely to […]
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain The medical community has long known that patients on long-term opioid therapy often have significantly more health care visits. But adhering to a standardized care process model for opioid prescriptions appears to reduce the overall number of health care visits for these patients while maintaining safety, shows new research published in […]
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Data on overdose and death are pretty reliable. But there’s still much that’s unknown about opioid misuse that doesn’t lead to an adverse outcome such as overdose. Drug surveys are reseachers’ main method of collecting data on opioid misuse. I’ve been in drug survey research for almost two decades, but in recent years I’ve learned […]
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State-level variation in the ED opioid prescribing rate for ankle sprains 2014 to 2015 among patients who were opioid naive. Credit: Penn Medicine Opioid prescribing for minor injuries—for which such powerful pain medications may not even be necessary—remains high and varies widely by state, despite an overall downward trend in prescribing, according to new research […]
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Expanding the availability of medication treatment for opioid use disorder in primary care settings would be a major step toward reducing overdose deaths, write two physicians specializing in addiction medicine and health care delivery in the July 5 issue of New England Journal of Medicine. In their Perspectives article entitled “Primary Care and the Opioid-Overdose […]
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Sterling McPherson. Credit: WSU Stopping long-term opioid treatment does not make chronic, non-cancer-related pain worse and, in some cases, makes it better, Washington State University researchers have found. The research marks a crucial first step towards understanding how ending long-term opioid therapy affects patients with different types of chronic pain and could help medical practitioners […]
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