The head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Jim Carroll, visited Indiana last week to meet with Governor Holcomb and discuss Indiana’s initiatives to combat the drug epidemic. Preliminary data from the CDC shows Indiana saw over a 12 percent decline in drug overdose deaths in the last year, which was almost three times the national decline. State and federal leaders discussed the continued priority of expanding access to substance use treatment facilities, especially in rural communities.
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Researchers from Indiana University, along with others from across the United States and Sweden, have received more than $1.6 million to study opioid use among pregnant women and the effect on children. The researchers want to determine if there is a relationship between mothers who use prescribed opioids during pregnancy and adverse outcomes for their children, which include preterm birth, reduced fetal growth, autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactive disorder. The results of this project could potentially refine the current guidelines for prescribing opioids for pregnant women.
Current research on buprenorphine hurdles has focused on the fact that not enough medical providers are certified to write buprenorphine prescriptions. Getting pharmacists involved in distributing buprenorphine may contribute to filling this gap in care. In fact, increasing pharmacists’ involvement may be more important than persuading doctors to prescribe it. While prescribers may be writing prescriptions for buprenorphine, pharmacists serve as the “gatekeeper” and may not distribute buprenorphine for a variety of reasons. Even when pharmacies do distribute buprenorphine, wholesalers require pharmacies to order the drug in small, frequent batches, leading to stocking issues.
A new set of guidelines developed by researchers at the University of Michigan have found that prescribing fewer opioids after operations did not lead to more patient discomfort. The study, which decreased the opioid prescription size for nine different surgical procedures from 26 to 18 pills, found no clinically important changes in pain scores. Seven months after the guidelines were implemented, prescription size (i.e. the number of pills in a prescription) declined significantly.
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