November 7th, 2011 by Mary Lynn McPherson, Pharm.D. in Opinion, Research
1 Comment »
The overdose death rate from prescription opioids, referred to as “narcotics”, has reached “epidemic levels” in the US according to a report just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The report further states that the intentional misuse and abuse of popular opioids such as OxyContin, Vicodin, methadone and others now cause more deaths than those caused by heroin and cocaine combined.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC Director told reporters that “Narcotics prescribed by physicians kill 40 people a day.” He continued by stating “Prescription painkillers are meant to help people who have severe pain. They are, however, highly addictive.”
The report states that increased prescribing of pain medications by doctors is a significant cause of this growing number of deaths. However, the situation is far more complicated than this report presents. Poor pain management and prescription drug abuse has become Read more »
October 30th, 2011 by GruntDoc in News
No Comments »
The irony here is that Eli Lilly has advanced sepsis care (as a prelude to using their drug), and while Xigris hasn’t panned out, aggressive sepsis resuscitation has.
Eli Lilly is withdrawing drotrecogin alfa (Xigris) from all markets worldwide after a major study failed to show a survival benefit for patients taking the drug.
…
Xigris should be discontinued immediately in patients currently receiving it and should not be started in new patients, the company said.
The trial with the bad news on Xigris was Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
September 22nd, 2011 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Opinion
No Comments »
I’m posting this because Roy fell asleep at the wheel and missed the Xanax article on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times. In “Abuse of Xanax Leads a Clinic to Halt Supply,” Abby Goodnough writes about a clinic where they’ve stopped prescribing Xanax because to many people are abusing it. Goodnough writes:
“It is such a drain on resources,” said Ms. Mink, whose employer, Seven Counties Services, serves some 30,000 patients in Louisville and the surrounding region. “You’re funneling a great deal of your energy into pacifying, educating, bumping heads with people over Xanax.”
Because of the clamor for the drug, and concern over the striking number of overdoses involving Xanax here and across the country, Seven Counties took an unusual step Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
August 12th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
No Comments »
Prescriptions for antidepressants given by nonpsychiatrists to patients without a specific psychiatric disorder increased more than 12% in 12 years, leading to the drug class becoming the third most commonly prescribed, a study found.
A study in the August issue of Health Affairs reported that antidepressant prescriptions by doctors who didn’t record a specific psychiatric disorder increased from 59.5% of all prescriptions by nonpsychiatrists in 1996 to 72.7% in 2007.
Researchers reviewed data on patients age eighteen or older from the 1996-2007 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys, a national sample of more than 233,000 office-based visits. The proportion of antidepressants prescribed for patients without a psychiatric diagnosis increased from 2.5% of all visits to nonpsychiatrist providers to 6.4% between 1996 and 2007. For visits to primary care providers, antidepressant prescribing grew from 3.1% to 7.1%. For other nonpsychiatric providers, visits without a psychiatric diagnosis grew from 1.9% to 5.8%. In contrast, antidepressants prescribed with a psychiatric diagnosis increased from 1.7% to 2.4%.
Patients who received antidepressants without a psychiatric diagnosis by nonpsychiatrist providers were more likely to be Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
July 10th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
No Comments »
About 10% of computer-generated prescriptions included at least one error, of which a third had potential for harm, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
This errors rate matched that of handwritten prescriptions, deflating at least one reason for the federal government’s incentives to switch providers to e-prescribing. The government had provided incentives for switching to e-prescribing; those turned to penalties for not doing so on July 30.
Researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study of 3,850 e-prescriptions received by a commercial outpatient pharmacy chain across three states over four weeks in 2008. A panel reviewed them for medication errors, potential adverse drug events, and rate of prescribing errors by type and by prescribing system. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
