Sharp Rise in Drug Overdoses Among U.S. Women: CDC

By Steven Reinberg
MedicineNet.com
Originally posted July 2, 2013

The rate of fatal overdoses of prescription painkillers and other drugs among U.S. women quadrupled between 1999 and 2010, federal officials reported Tuesday.

Long thought of as primarily a male problem, drug addiction is increasingly affecting women, and the new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 42 women in the United States die each day from prescription drug overdoses.

"Prescription drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed in women," CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said during a noon press conference. "Mothers, wives, sisters and daughters are dying from overdoses at rates we have never seen before."

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Other statistics, based on 2010 data:

• Suicides from these drugs accounted for 34 percent of all suicides among women, compared with 8 percent among men.
• More than 940,000 women were seen in emergency departments for drug misuse or abuse.
• More than 6,600 women, or 18 women every day, died from a prescription painkiller overdose.
• Narcotic painkillers accounted for four times more deaths among women than deaths linked to cocaine and heroin combined.
• More than 200,000 emergency department visits were for misuse or abuse of these drugs among women -- about one every three minutes.

The entire story is here.

Antipsychotic Drugs Grow More Popular for Patients without Mental Illness

By Sandra G. Boodman

The Washington Post

Published March 12, 2012

Adriane Fugh-Berman was stunned by the question: Two graduate students who had no symptoms of mental illness wondered if she thought they should take a powerful schizophrenia drug each had been prescribed to treat insomnia.

“It’s a total outrage,” said Fugh-Berman, a physician who is an associate professor of pharmacology at Georgetown University. “These kids needed some basic sleep [advice], like reducing their intake of caffeine and alcohol, not a highly sedating drug.”

Those Georgetown students exemplify a trend that alarms medical experts, policymakers and patient advocates: the skyrocketing increase in the off-label use of an expensive class of drugs called atypical antipsychotics. Until the past decade these 11 drugs, most approved in the 1990s, had been reserved for the approximately 3 percent of Americans with the most disabling mental illnesses, chiefly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; more recently a few have been approved to treat severe depression.

But these days atypical antipsychotics — the most popular are Seroquel, Zyprexa and Abilify — are being prescribed by psychiatrists and primary-care doctors to treat a panoply of conditions for which they have not been approved, including anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, sleep difficulties, behavioral problems in toddlers and dementia. These new drugs account for more than 90 percent of the market and have eclipsed an older generation of antipsychotics. Two recent reports have found that youth in foster care, some less than a year old, are taking more psychotropic drugs than other children, including those with the severest forms of mental illness.

The rest of the story is here.