Youth opioid overdoses spiked during the pandemic, according to a study analyzing nationwide emergency medicine encounters recently published in JAMA.
More than 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, according to the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention.
Deaths from drug overdoses are rising faster among adolescents, largely due to fentanyl, said Jamie Lim, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, who was first author of the study.
“Most of the data we have on the opioid epidemic is mortality data,” Lim said. “But we wanted to get a broader perspective of what was going on by taking a look at non-fatal overdoses, too, specifically with opioids and youth.”
In the study, Lim and his collaborators analyzed data from more than 90,000 opioid-related emergency medical service (EMS) encounters involving youth in the U.S. from 2018 to 2022.
Boys and young men made up 65 percent of the opioid overdoses, and young adults aged 18-24 made up 87 percent of the cases, with a majority of all overdoses (58 percent) occurring at a private residence.
The study investigators found that pre-pandemic overdoses were already rising when they spiked during the pandemic. While overdose numbers have remained stable since the pandemic, they’re still higher than before, Lim said.
“I think this is a good and a bad thing,” Lim said. “Good because overdoses didn’t continue to rise, but bad because they’re still higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The findings of the study should encourage parents of teens to keep naloxone, which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, on hand at home, Lim said.
“From our data, we found that a majority of overdoses occurred at home,” Lim said. “This is, I think, an indication that parents – especially those who have teenagers and other young people in their home who are at risk of overdose – should be carrying naloxone at home.”
Anyone can now purchase naloxone over the counter at select drug stores, or request it from a pharmacist, Lim said, and most insurances will cover the cost.
“This is another call to keep a really close eye on this population, specifically youth, and to figure out where the rates of drug overdoses – both fatal and non-fatal – go from here,” Lim said.
Sriram Ramgopal, MD, and Jennifer Hoffmann, ’13 MD, both assistant professors of Pediatrics in the Division of Emergency Medicine, were co-authors of the study.
This study was supported by grants U1IMC43532 and U1IMC45814 from the Pediatric Pandemic Network.
