posted on 2019-09-04, 10:57authored byGolo Kronenberg, Deepti Desai, Ion Anghelescu
[First paragraph] Drug overdose fatalities in the United States have reached an all-time high. Deplorably, many other countries are following suit. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that, in 2017, opioids were involved in 47,600 overdose deaths (CDC, 2018), a number which dwarfs the number of car crash fatalities in the same year. Regrettably, the ‘Inexorable March to Death and Addiction’ (Theisen and Davies, 2019) is fueled, to a large part, by an invidious trend of medical overprescribing and misprescribing, which disproportionately affects patients with mental health disorders (Seal et al., 2012). Moreover, accruing evidence suggests that opioid use may directly precipitate depressive symptoms. For example, a large retrospective cohort study collating data from three independent healthcare systems including the Veterans Health Administration demonstrated that duration of opioid use is associated with the new onset of depression (Scherrer et al., 2016a). The risk of developing treatment-resistant depression was also found to grow with duration of opioid exposure (Scherrer et al., 2016b).
History
Citation
Journal of Affective Disorders, 2019, 259, pp. 173-174
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES/School of Medicine/Department of Cardiovascular Sciences
Version
AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Published in
Journal of Affective Disorders
Publisher
Elsevier for International Society for Affective Disorders
The file associated with this record is under embargo until 12 months after publication, in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above.