Medications that treat opioid addiction and prevent overdose deaths are drastically under-prescribed in the United States, particularly for Black patients, a new study has found.
Disabled people on Medicare are not likely to be prescribed either buprenorphine – the best medication for treating opioid addiction – or naloxone (Narcan), a drug that can reverse a life-threatening overdose, researchers report in the May 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Further, Black Americans are even less likely than whites to receive these meds following a medical event that clearly indicates the patient has opioid use disorder, according to lead researcher Dr. Michael Barnett, an associate professor of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
“We found that white patients were about 80 percent more likely to get any treatment after one of these central events than Black patients,” Barnett shares. “We were particularly surprised at how low the rates of treatment were, given the kind of high level of need and high risk in this particular population.”
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For the study, Barnett and his colleagues analyzed claims data for more than 23,000 disabled people 18 and older covered by Medicare between 2016 and 2019.
This group is disproportionately affected by opioid addiction, with some estimates suggesting they represent one in four opioid overdoses in the United States, researchers said in background notes.
The researchers looked for events that would have brought a person’s opioid use disorder to the attention of a health professional – an overdose, a hospitalization for drug use-related infection or detox care, for example.
They then assessed whether the patient received a prescription for buprenorphine or naloxone within six months of that event.
Results showed that only 23 percent of white patients, 19 percent of Hispanic patients and 13 percent of Black patients received a buprenorphine prescription.
Buprenorphine is “a medication that is known to be pretty effective, and yet across the populations identified in