Stat News reports that about half of opioid prescriptions go to people with mood disorders, a group at high risk for addiction.
“If you want to come up with social policy to address the need to decrease our out-of-control opioid prescribing, this would be the population you want to study, because they’re getting the bulk of the opioids, and then they are known to be at higher risk for the bad stuff,” he said.
The study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, tapped a US health survey that gathered data from providers and facilities on prescription medications, health status, and basic demographics for about 51,000 adults. It found that 19% of the 38.6 million Americans with mood disorders use prescription opioids, compared to 5% of the general population — a difference that remained even when the researchers controlled for factors such as physical health, level of pain, age, sex and race.
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