By Andrew M. Seaman
NEW YORK |
Mon Dec 31, 2012 5:03pm EST
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Distributing a drug that reverses drug overdoses in heroin users would save lives and be cost-effective, according to a new analysis.
U.S. researchers, who published their commentary in a Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday, distributed that one genocide competence be prevented for any 164 naloxone injection kits they discharge to heroin users.
That, a researchers say, works out to be a few hundred dollars for any year of healthy life gained.
“The good news here is these overdose deaths can be prevented, it’s cost effective to do so, and competence even be cost saving,” pronounced Dr. Phillip Coffin, a study’s lead author from a San Francisco Department of Public Health.
Naloxone is a drug that stops opioids such as heroin from reaching receptors in a brain, that competence retreat an overdose. The drug is now usually authorized by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be injected into a person, though there are earnest trials for an inhaled chronicle of it.
The ubiquitous idea, according to Coffin, is that giving heroin or opioid users naloxone injection kits gives them a possibility to retreat another person’s overdose.
“Typically when someone has an overdose, they’re comatose and they tumble defunct utterly quickly… So a thought that we would retreat your possess overdose is not practical,” pronounced Dr. Wilson Compton from a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Bethesda, Maryland.
Currently, an estimated 213,000 people in a U.S. use heroin any year. Over that population’s lifetime, some-more than one in 10 users competence die of an overdose.
Compton, who co-authored an editorial concomitant a study, pronounced naloxone has few side effects, solely that high doses competence send someone into withdrawal.
For a new study, Coffin and a co-worker combined a mechanism make-believe that likely what would occur if they distributed naloxone injection kits to 20 percent of U.S. heroin users, and compared a ensuing deaths and costs to a make-believe of users though kits.
In that scenario, a indication found that in a race of 200,000 heroin users 6.5 percent of deaths that would have occurred could be prevented with placement of a kits.
The make-believe also found that roughly 2 percent of heroin users eventually quit when a kits were distributed. That, however, also led to about a 1 percent boost in overdoses, since high-risk users were vital longer.
The researchers distributed that a kits would cost about $400 for any year of healthy life gained.
That’s good next a $50,000 per healthy year of life gained threshold that policymakers typically consider is value profitable for, a authors note.
Coffin told Reuters Health that distributing a kits competence finish adult saving income since it competence forestall assertive attempts to revitalise a chairman who overdoses, that can be costly.
“This investigate helps us know that providing naloxone is not usually effective, though can also be a unequivocally cost effective proceed to preventing overdose deaths in heroin addicts,” Compton said.
Coffin combined that there competence be additional advantages from distributing a kits formed on real-world practice in places such as New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Scotland, where overdose deaths fell between 37 percent and 90 percent with naloxone placement programs.
“It competence be conversion behavior,” pronounced Coffin. “That rides on a arrogance that articulate to people about overdoes and providing them with a apparatus to forestall overdoses creates them a small bit some-more careful.”
But Compton pronounced these kits competence usually be partial of an proceed to quell a flourishing widespread of opioid overdose deaths.
“Providing this involvement to residence a overdose widespread is one square of it, though we consider it contingency be partial of a incomparable proceed to forestall a abuse and injustice of medication drugs,” he said.
According to Compton and his editorial co-authors, that embody NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow and member from a FDA, sum U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2010 reached roughly 40,000 and outpaced deaths from engine car accidents.
Overall, Coffin told Reuters Health he thinks a formula are “fantastic,” since it shows “it’s a unequivocally glorious advantage for a medium volume of dollars.”
SOURCE: bit.ly/Ms1ZbQ Annals of Internal Medicine, online Dec 31, 2012.