Opioid overdose deaths triple among US kids, teens: Study
The death rate from opioid overdose among US children and teens have tripled in the past two decades amid an ongoing drug epidemic in the country, a new study shows.
Almost 9,000 children and teenagers died from opioid poisoning from 1999 to 2016, and annual deaths increased threefold over the 18 years, a team of researchers at Yale University reported Friday.
The finding suggests the opioid epidemic will likely continue unless lawmakers, public health officials, doctors and parents do more to keep the drugs out of the hands of young people, the study said.
More than 80 percent of the deaths among children and teens were unintentional, while five percent were from suicide and about 2 percent from homicide, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"These deaths don't reach the magnitude of adult deaths from opioids, but they follow a similar pattern," said lead researcher Julie Gaither, an instructor at the Yale School of Medicine.
While whites and males are those most likely to die from drug overdoses, other groups such as girls, blacks and Hispanics are catching up, Gaither said.
Over 70,000 people in the United States died from a drug overdose in 2017, setting a new record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The rise in drug overdose deaths and suicides last year were main factors contributing to the ongoing decline in life expectancy in the US since 2014.
In November 2017, US President Donald Trump declared the country's drug crisis a “public health emergency.”
The US opioid epidemic ravaging American communities has cost over $1 trillion since 2001, and may exceed another $500 billion over the next three years, according to a study released in February by Altarum, a health systems research and consulting organization.
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