Despite improvements in treatment access as the overdose crisis has spiraled over the last decade, many people with opioid use disorder aren’t getting medications to treat their addiction, a new study has found.
Data on how many people use medication to treat opioid use disorder is scattered across different databases, and estimating how many people are struggling with an opioid addiction in the United States is even harder, said Noa Krawczyk, an assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine and the study’s lead author. “We have to rely on a lot of disjointed data,” she said.
To reach a more accurate estimate of the extent of opioid addiction in the U.S., Krawczyk and other researcher consulted a more comprehensive 2018 study from Massachusetts, which estimated that opioid addiction rates in the state were nearly 4.5 times higher than federal estimates. Applying that multiplier nationwide, Krawcyzk said, data show that it’s likely that around 86% of people with opioid use disorder aren’t receiving medications for it.
“Even in the best case scenario, we are still missing a high portion of the population with opioid use disorder,” Krawcyzk said. “We didn’t need to know exactly what the gap is in order to know that there is one, but it’s important to understand what the extent of the problem is.”
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