CDC: Opioid Prescribing Peaked in 2010
/By Pat Anson, Editor
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted something today that most doctors and pain patients could have told the agency several years ago: prescriptions for opioid painkillers are declining.
In its newest Vital Signs report, the CDC analyzed prescription drug data compiled by QuintilesIMS from 2006 to 2015, and found that opioid prescribing in the U.S. peaked in 2010. More recent data indicates the downward trend continued in 2016.
The CDC's new report undermines one of the main reasons behind the agency’s 2016 opioid prescribing guidelines, which falsely claimed that “opioid prescriptions per capita increased from 2007 to 2012,” when, in fact, they actually declined (see chart below).
“Overall, opioid prescribing in the United States is down 18 percent since 2010,” said CDC Acting Director Anne Schuchat, MD.
But even with that downward trend in prescribing, the CDC maintains opioid doses are still too high and contributing to the nation’s overdose crisis.
“Despite these overall declines, the bottom line remains we still have too many people getting opioid prescriptions for too many days at too high a dose,” said Schuchat. “In addition, the dramatic increase we’ve been seeing in heroin overdose is another tragic consequence of exposing too many people to prescription opioids, since most people who use heroin started off with misusing prescription opioids.”
Schuchat did not explain how her theory could account for the fact that heroin overdoses were increasing at a time when opioid prescriptions were declining. The association between heroin use and prescription painkillers is a common misconception at best, and a misleading half-truth at worst.
While many heroin users start out with painkillers (as well as tobacco, marijuana, alcohol and other drugs), most obtain their opioids illegally through friends, relatives and the black market. Heroin use by patients who are legally prescribed painkillers is actually quite rare, although the CDC's acting director makes it sound like one of the leading causes of overdoses.
"We're now experiencing the highest overdose drug death rates ever recorded in the United States, driven by prescription opioids and illicit opioids like heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl," Schuchat said.
Contrary to its own prescribing guideline, the CDC found that the average per capita daily morphine equivalent dose (MME) has been in decline for nearly a decade, from 59.7 MME per capita in 2006 to 48.1 MME in 2015.
The latter dose is well below the highest recommended limit of 90 MME in the CDC guidelines.
AVERAGE DAILY PER CAPITA MORPHINE EQUIVELANT DOSE (MME)
The CDC also found a wide variation in prescribing practices around the country, with six times more opioids per resident dispensed in the highest-prescribing counties than in the lowest-prescribing ones.
Many of the high-prescribing counties are in rural, economically depressed areas such as Appalachia, where there are high rates of disability, suicide and unemployment; suggesting that the so-called "opioid epidemic" is actually more of an epidemic of despair. Other factors associated with high rates of opioid prescribing are a high percentage of white residents, high rates of uninsured or Medicaid recipients, and high rates of patients with diabetes and arthritis.
