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Fatal opioid overdoses reduce life expectancy in the US by almost a year

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Fatal opioid overdoses reduce life expectancy in the US by almost a year

Loss of life expectancy and years of life lost per capita in the US. Credit: The Lancet Regional Health – Americas (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.lana.2024.100813

In the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, opioid-related deaths reduced the country’s average life expectancy at birth by eight months, according to research. new research published in The Lancet Regional Health America. The findings also suggest that young minorities are bearing the brunt of this crisis, with overdose deaths nearly doubling in recent years among Blacks, Hispanics and American Indian/Alaska Natives.

Alison Hill, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and postdoctoral researcher Anne H. Hébert said the study provides important insights into how the opioid epidemic has evolved since the onset of COVID-19, which has challenged people’s support systems and disrupted economic stability. and access to healthcare.

The researchers found that in 2022 alone, more than 80,000 of the 3.3 million deaths in the United States were caused by opioid-related overdoses. These deaths mainly affected young adults: Compared to the average life expectancy in the US at the time, those who died from an opioid overdose lost an average of 38 years of life.

“The number of deaths alone hardly reflects the enormous burden of the opioid crisis on this country,” said Hill, senior author of the study. “These are people in their 20s and 30s who are not close to the end of their lives. It really takes away a lot of potential years in which they could have lived and contributed to society.”

The pair used publicly available mortality data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, Hébert explained, to analyze the demographic characteristics of every individual in the United States who died of an opioid-related overdose between 2019 and 2022.

They developed a method to calculate both the impact of these deaths on the country’s overall life expectancy and the individual years of life lost by each victim, defined as the difference between a person’s age at death and their expected lifespan.

Their analysis confirmed that the demographics of those who died from opioids changed significantly as the pandemic progressed: What was once seen as a “rural white problem” was seeping into other racial and ethnic communities at an alarming rate, they found.

“What this tells us is that we need to start addressing the factors that can contribute to opioid abuse in all types of communities,” Hill said.

The data revealed another troubling trend: “polysubstance” overdoses, or overdoses involving more than one drug, made up about half of opioid-related deaths. During the study period, people died from a combination of opioids and stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine. Hill noted that polysubstance overdoses are harder to treat and therefore more deadly, further complicating an already out-of-control epidemic.

The team said its findings are based on the most current mortality data available from the CDC. The researchers made their analyzes available through a public dashboard that allows non-experts to examine how this burden varies across geographic locations, ages, genders, and racial and ethnic groups. They will continue to update the dashboard as new mortality data for 2023 and subsequent years is released.

“We want to raise awareness of how the problem is spreading and the devastating impact opioid addiction is having on the country,” Hébert said. “Someone can click through the dashboard and see what’s happening in their state or community, or how the numbers have changed over the years. It makes science more accessible to everyone.”

So where do we go from here? Data can point us in the right direction, Hill said.

“Given these trends, it is important to provide public health officials and policymakers with more comprehensive data so they can develop strategies to reduce opioid-related deaths,” she said.

And they must act quickly, the researchers added.

“Looking at specific affected groups, specific affected regions and specific drug combinations provides a much more detailed picture of how to address this crisis, which is only getting worse over time,” Hill said.

In the future, Hill and Hébert plan to explore other data trends that could shed light on the crisis, such as non-fatal overdoses, which could be explored but are not currently captured in nationally representative or widely accessible databases.

More information:
Anne H. Hébert et al., Impact of opioid overdoses on life expectancy and years of life lost in the US, by demographic group and stimulant co-involvement: an analysis of mortality data from 2019 to 2022, The Lancet Regional Health America (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.lana.2024.100813

Provided by Johns Hopkins University


Quote: Fatal opioid overdoses reduce US life expectancy by nearly a year (2024, July 31), retrieved August 3, 2024 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-fatal-opioid-overdoses-life-year .html

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