Opioid overdose deaths dramatically increased among older black men over a decade

Opioid overdose deaths among the elderly increased dramatically from 1999 to 2019, especially among non-Hispanic black men, according to results published in JAMA network open.

“A lot of us think of drug abuse as a youth problem. However, older people are experiencing an explosion in fatal opioid overdoses ”, Maryann Mason, PhD, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics, said in a press release.

In a longitudinal cross-sectional study, Mason and colleagues examined data on opioid overdose deaths in adults aged 55 and older from the CDC’s Multiple Causes of Death database. Data on deaths that occurred between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2019 were stratified by sex, race and ethnicity.

Overall, 79,893 adults in the United States died of an opioid overdose during the study period; 79.97% of these deaths were in adults aged 55 to 64 and 58.98% were in men. Mason and his colleagues reported that the number of opioid overdoses among the elderly was 518 in 1999 and rose to 10,292 in 2019, an increase of 1,886%, according to the release. The annual opioid overdose death rates per 100,000 people aged 55 and over have increased over time, ranging from 0.9 in 1999 to 10.7 in 2019.

Maryann mason

In 2013, opioid overdose rates among non-Hispanic black men began to diverge, the researchers said. In 2019, the opioid overdose death rate among older, non-Hispanic black men was 40.03 per 100,000 people. This rate was four times higher than the overall opioid overdose death rate among the elderly. At its lowest, the overdose death rate among non-Hispanic black men was 2.24 deaths per 100,000 people, according to Mason and colleagues. Conversely, Hispanic women and non-Hispanic people from Asia or the Pacific Islands aged 55 and over had the lowest overdose death rates; the rates have never exceeded 3 deaths per 100,000 people.

“Like [opioid overdose] rates started increasing exponentially for black men in 2013, fentanyl was becoming more common in the drug supply, ”Mason told Healio. “This suggests to me that black men may have been more involved in the use of illicit opioids than other subgroups of older adults.”

The high rates of drug use among black men may also be linked to social determinants of health such as poverty, substandard housing, lack of access to health care and drug treatment, and experiences. trauma living in high violence-load and low-resource communities, she added.

Ending the opioid epidemic requires short-term harm reduction and improving long-term social determinants of health, Mason said.

The references:

Mason M, et al. JAMA Network Open. 2022; doi: 10.1001 / jamanetworkopen.2021.42982.

Opioid overdose death rates in the elderly are on the rise. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/01/older-adult-opioid-overdose-death-rates-on-the-rise/&fj=1. Posted January 11, 2022. Accessed January 11, 2022.

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