To save people who have become addicted to opioids, better monitoring of their medical course is necessary.
- The number of hospitalizations linked to the consumption of opioid analgesics obtained on medical prescription has increased by 167% in France.
- Analyzing the medical records of opioid users makes it possible to better detect addiction problems.
Faced with the opioid crisis affecting France and the United States, researchers are trying to stem this overconsumption of painkillers, overdoses of which are fatal. A new study of JAMA highlights that the monitoring of dematerialized health records (the equivalent of the DMP in France, editor’s note) is a valuable source of information for detecting patients suffering from disorders related to the misuse of opiates.
The DSM-5 criteria
More specifically, this cross-sectional study demonstrated that:
– The DSM-5 criteria used to establish opioid use disorders can be extracted from the review of electronic health records.
– Patients who are monitored have a higher average prevalence of opioid use disorders and a higher average number of psychiatric comorbidities associated with opioid use.
For scientists, “Indirect measures that rely on multiple data sources, including past prescriptions and electronic medical record notes, can help identify patients with opioid use disorder.” Many of them had never been diagnosed.
This retrospective study collected data between December 31, 2000 and May 31, 2017. The cohort was made up of 16,253 opioid users followed by health professionals and a control group of 16,253 opioid users. opioids without special supervision.
Decreased life expectancy
More than 70,000 Americans died in 2017 from opioid overdoses, making it one of the main causes of the decrease in life expectancy in the United States in recent years.
The most consumed opioid analgesic in France is tramadol, followed by codeine. Next come morphine, oxycodone and fentanyl. Since 2006, the prescription of strong opioids has increased by approximately 150% (oxycodone marks the largest increase). Result: the number of hospitalizations linked to the consumption of opioid analgesics obtained on medical prescription increased by 167% between 2000 and 2017, from 15 to 40 hospitalizations per million inhabitants. The number of deaths linked to the consumption of opioids increased by 146% between 2000 and 2015 in France, with at least 4 deaths per week.
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