Jonathan Kopel BS
Opioid mortality has become a significant medical and economic burden in the United States, accounting for over 66.3% of drug-related overdoses and $78 billion dollars in health care costs. The current US “opioid crisis” has continued to grow with an estimated 2.5 million patients being diagnosed with opioid use disorders in 2016. In response, policy makers and government agencies have initiated several programs to mitigate the adverse effects of opioids through expanding access and delivery of evidenced-based treatment and rehabilitation programs. Rural communities remain significant risk factors for opioid overdose and mortality in areas lacking access to opioid therapy. Despite measures to provide access to rehabilitation and medical therapy, the opioid-related mortality rate in rural areas has increased significantly due to greater opioid prescriptions in these areas, an out-migration of young adults, greater rural social and kinship network connections, and economic stressors. However, limited opioid-related mortality data in rural regions, such as West Texas, impede further analysis and investigation into effective programs for preventing and treating opioid overdoses in these communities.
Keywords: Opioid, addiction, mortality, and rural communities
Article citation: Kopel J. Opioid mortality in rural communities. The Southwest Respiratory and Critical Care Chronicles 2019;7(31):59–62
From: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine, Lubbock, Texas
Submitted: 7/24/2019
Accepted: 10/7/2019
Reviewer: Gilbert Berdine MD
Conflicts of interest: none
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
♦ The US government has at least 15 different official definitions for the word “rural”. The Census Bureau defines rural as “any place outside a town, city, or urban cluster with more than 2,500 residents.”