Opioid prescribing down, but OD-related hospital visits continue to climb: study
TORONTO — Medically sanctioned opioid use has dropped by almost 14 per cent since national guidelines for prescribing the drugs were introduced in 2010, yet the rate of overdose-related hospital visits continued to rise, an Ontario study has found.
The study found opioid-related hospitalizations in the province rose 13 per cent between May 2010 and the end of 2013, possibly because people who continue to take these addictive narcotics for chronic non-cancer pain were often prescribed them in high doses, placing them at greater risk for overdose.
To conduct the study, researchers examined health data for people who were eligible for the Ontario Drug Benefit program between 2003 and 2014, identifying almost 770,000 who were dispensed at least one opioid prescription during that period.
“We looked specifically at hospital visits for opioid overdoses and found that the rates of those visits had continued to climb over that same period and don’t appear to have been impacted by the guidelines,” said Tara Gomes, a scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, who led the research.