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The current crisis of opioid overdose is actually part of a 40-year trend that continues to progress, and current efforts to combat it may not be enough, researchers said Thursday.
A new analysis of overdose deaths shows that while the drug of choice may change and the types of people affected may change, the trend is clear: the number of Americans dying from overdoses has increased exponentially since decades.
This started before the availability of synthetic opioids, and could have little to do with the prescribing habits of doctors or the unabashed habits of drug manufacturers, found the team at the University of Pittsburgh.
"The opioid crisis may be part of a longer-term process," writes the team in its report in the journal Science.
"The epidemic of drug overdoses in the United States inexorably follows an exponential growth curve since at least 1979, well before the surge in prescription opioids in the mid-1990s."
The Department of Health and Social Services has released $ 1 billion this week to fight the epidemic. Funds have been allocated for drugs to help people stop using opioids and behavioral programs.
HHS said the number of opioid prescriptions had already dropped by 21% since January 2017.
But if the findings of Pitt's team are right, the outbreak will continue to worsen.
"If we try to deal with the opioid epidemic, we can probably make a difference for a while," said Dr. Donald Burke, dean of the Pitt School of Public Health, at NBC News.
However, several factors underlying the ongoing epidemic, many of which have nothing to do with available drugs, said Burke, who led the study team.
Burke predicts that new drugs and new pathways to take them to the streets will keep the epidemic alive. These include societal and cultural factors.
"That's one reason American society has to pay attention to the loss of sense of purpose, growing economic disparity, loss of community," Burke said.
In 2017, nearly 48,000 people died of an opioid overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Jerome Adams, a general surgeon, said Thursday that he wanted to educate the public about opioid addiction as a brain disease.
The CDC has accused doctors, in part, of prescribing opioids too freely for inappropriate reasons, and urged Americans to treat their pain in a less dangerous way, including using painkillers like ibuprofen, ice cream, and stretching. .
CDC data also show that the introduction of unapproved synthetic drugs, designed to resemble fentanyl, has doubled the overdose mortality rates from 2015 to 2016.
Death rates among young adults have increased so much that they have reduced the overall life expectancy of the American population as a whole.
But no medicine is to blame, found Burke and his colleagues.
They traced nearly 600,000 deaths from 1979 to each category of drug or drug, including heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and prescription pain killers.
On a graph, they all increased over time, but not consistently.
Deaths have also been observed in different communities.
"At first, the highest mortality rates were in the big coastal cities," Burke said.
"Next, this pattern has shifted to higher mortality rates in large cities. They are in small towns and Appalachians, "he added. "The drugs and the places and the demographics have changed."
The team added all the deaths together and graphed them again.
"You take all these mortality rates from one year to the next and you put them on a log scale, it's a perfect straight line," Burke said. Mortality rates have doubled about every nine years, the graph showed.
"This remarkably smooth, long-term pattern of epidemic growth has really caught our attention," Burke added. "If we can understand it, we should be able to lower that curve."
The findings are in line with what suicide experts have said – that many Americans feel increasingly disconnected and desperate, contributing to an increase in suicides.
Burke said it was important to look at all the causes of drug overdoses. "I do not try to blame it anywhere," he said.
"We must do both: pay attention to the drugs that are causing the problem today, but at the same time, solve the problems in the long run."
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