Painkiller linked to rise in overdose deaths

[gwenith, BSN, RN]

Painkiller linked to rise in overdose deaths

10:32 07 March 04 Doctors prescribing methadone for pain relief may inadvertently be the cause of an alarming rise in deaths related to the drug in the US. Forensic science experts fear that a huge increase in methadone prescriptions is feeding the black market and encouraging abuse.

In 2001, the Food and Drug Administration's MedWatch programme recorded 61 methadone-related deaths in the US. That is more than occurred in the whole of the 1990s, and by 2002 the number had doubled to 123.

The figures confirm reports from Maine, Florida, Oklahoma, North Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland that methadone-related deaths are rising. Methadone is often used to wean addicts off heroin, and the recent spate of deaths has led to calls for heroin-treatment programmes to be curtailed.

But the drug is also used to treat chronic pain - in cancer patients, for example. It works well because it stays in the body for a long time, taking between 15 and 55 hours to be broken down to half its initial levels, compared with a matter of minutes for heroin. The downside is that this means accidental overdoses are common, even when the drug is prescribed.

full story here http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994736

[leslie :-D]

my initial thought is that since methadone has such a long half-life, cancer pts. are also taking different types of drugs, compounding the effects of the methadone.

for the addicts, i'm not convinced that there's an increase in deaths since addicts generally don't know when to stop. many die from od's, and not just from methadone.