RESEARCH UPDATE:
NEW EVIDENCE FROM HIGH-RISK OPIOID USE AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE INCIDENCE – OPIOID SUBSTITUTION TREATMENT (OST) IS WORSENING, NOT TREATING AMERICA’S LETHAL EPIDEMICS
By Clark Miller
Published July 4, 2019
Updated April 14, 2021
An important, direct measure of high-risk use of opioids is incidence of opioid injection-related infectious disease, like endocarditis.
Think about it – incidence of infectious diseases caused by injection of opioids. That use of opioids is high-risk. If the rapidly expanding medical provision of substitute opioid drugs as Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT, “OST”, or “OAT”) provides benefit to at-risk users including lowering risk of overdose and death, the mechanism is by reducing risk and associated problems related to their opioid use.
Trends of decreased incidence of an injection-related infectious disease could be attributed to a variety of factors including: changes in public health, prevention, or medical interventions; decrease in high-risk opioid use including use by injection; clean needle exchanges; behavioral health treatments; others. Identifying the factor(s) any decreases could be confidently attributed to would require that multiple congruent, well-designed studies and other lines of evidence point to those factors and not others.
Increases in incidence, like those we’re seeing, are different. If increases of significant magnitude occur over the same time period that an intervention, like the medical OST fix, hypothesized to be a “treatment” or protective factor has also increased, then that constitutes strong evidence against that intervention as beneficial in reducing high-risk use.
Below – new evidence for national trends
In a variety of settings and nationally, high-risk opioid use as measured by non-lethal overdose incidence has worsened with increasing provision of the medical model fix, against prediction if OST provides benefit. Another, independent measure of high-risk use – incidence of opioid- and injection-related infectious diseases including endocarditis – also shows an OST-invalidating pattern of increase in response to large increases over decades of provison of opioid substitution medicine.
As we would predict from everything we know about problem substance use
and the failure of medical approaches to provide benefit for that non-medical problem, those diseases are increasing in prevalence.
That’s been true in Ontario, Canada and in Columbus, Ohio.
In Franklin County, Ohio, cases of drug-injection-related infectious endocarditis, a measure of injection drug use, have skyrocketed over the years 2012 – 2017.
Specifically, the increase in incidence of those cases increased 436 percent, most of that increase attributable to use of heroin by injection.
Investigators found that overall admissions for infective endocarditis at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center increased 101% from 2012 to 2017, with most of the increase coming from the 436% jump in drug-related cases. The research, which was presented at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) 2019 Annual Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, LA, found that most of the cases of endocarditis related to drug use involved heroin.
Significant, extended increases in medical provision of buprenorphine and methadone OST should necessarily have resulted in the opposite outcome – decreases over the same time period of high-risk opioid use . . . unless . . . as is generally and predictably the case, the provision of a medical model “treatment”, unsupported and indicated against by research evidence for an entirely non-medical condition – compulsive problem opioid use – has predictably resulted in a worsening of an iatrogenic lethal opioid crisis rather than providing benefit.
Evidence points to those trends being examples of a generalized, national epidemiology.
And, the national trends are occurring in response to large increases in provision of the medical OST fix for high-risk opioid use, over decades –
A new report summarizes findings and concerns from across the country –
One type of opioid-related infection that researchers are grappling with involves diseased heart valves. Bacteria such as S. aureus can enter the bloodstream as a result of practices such as needle sharing or not cleaning the skin before injecting a drug. If the infection reaches the heart, it can damage the valves. Severe cases can require a heart transplant.
In an ongoing study, microbiologist Cecilia Thompson at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill is sequencing DNA from heart valves collected from people who have had surgery to replace diseased valves with artificial ones. Thompson found that valves taken from people who had injected drugs were more likely to be infected with S. aureus than were those of non-users.
Thompson presented her results at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in San Francisco, California, on 21 June. But these are just the latest observations of what seems to be a worrying trend. In a study published in January1, researchers found a tenfold increase in heart infections among drug users in North Carolina between 2007 and 2017. Doctors in the state used to perform less than 10 surgeries to treat drug-related heart infections five years ago, compared with more than 100 now.
There is no need to scramble to understand these trends.
They were predictable from everything we’ve known about the provision of a reductionist medical model fix for the complex non-medical problem of compulsive substance use and affirmed by consistently accumulating evidence that the diversion of public health resources to invalidated opioid substitution approaches and away from evidence-based therapies is driving and worsening illicit, high-risk opioid use and lethal epidemics.
These consistently accumulating results – high-risk opioid use increasing in response to increasing provision of the medical model “treatment” for high-risk opioid use – predictably invalidate and expose the fabricated evidence base for the publicly-funded medical fix for the non-medical condition of compulsive substance use.
For rates of opioid injection-related infectious disease, as with increasing rates of another measure of high-risk opioid use – non-lethal overdose – as provision of the medical cure increases, predictable, invalidating outcomes and patterns are emerging.
