5 Things You Didn't Know About the Opioid Epidemic - Article Health

It’s difficult to escape headlines about the opioid epidemic. The crisis has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and has cost the United States more than $1 trillion since 2001. Currently, more than 115 people die every day after overdosing on opioids, including prescription painkillers (like OxyContin or Percocet) and illicit drugs like heroin and fentanyl.

According to a recent government survey, one in five Americans knows someone personally who has been addicted to opioids or prescription painkillers. But if you’re not part of that 20%—or even if you are—the true toll of the opioid epidemic, and what it’s really like to experience it, may still come as a shock. Here are some of the most eye-opening facts and surprising statistics.

More than one-third of American adults have used opioids
In fact, more than a third of American adults (about 38%) used at least one prescription opioid in 2015 alone. That’s the finding of a 2017 survey in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which also found that about 13% of those who took opioids actually misused them—either taking them without a prescription or not as directed.

Opioid-related deaths have nearly doubled in the last decade
According to a 2017 study in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society, opioid-related hospital deaths nearly doubled from 2009 to 2015. Over the same time period, the number of overdose-related admissions to hospital intensive care units also increased by 34%.

Opioid overdoses among children have doubled, too
Mirroring adult trends, childhood hospitalizations due to opioid overdoses have also nearly doubled—from 797 between 2004 and 2006 to 1,504 between 2013 and 2015, according to a recent Pediatrics study. Those numbers don’t just reflect older kids using drugs intentionally, either: One-third of the hospitalizations reported in the study were for children younger than 6.

We don't really know how many people have died—but it's probably more than we realize
Recent estimates suggest that more than 42,000 people died of an opioid overdose in 2016 alone, and that these drugs accounted for about 20% of all deaths among young adults that year. As if that weren't enough, however, a study published this week in Public Health Reports reports that those numbers only make up part of the total death toll.

All age groups and regions have been affected
“Addiction is such a non-discriminatory disease,” says Veach. “It doesn’t matter if you’re at the top level of your job with CEO status or if you’re in school as an eighth-grader; the brain can still become hijacked.”

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