Did 70,000 Opioid Deaths Go Uncounted?
/Pat Anson, Editor
The nation’s overdose epidemic may be worse than it appears, according to a new study that estimates as many as 70,000 opioid-related overdose deaths since 1999 were not included in mortality figures because of incomplete reporting.
The study, which does not distinguish between deaths involving prescription opioids and those linked to illegal opioids such as heroin, adds to growing evidence that the government's overdose statistics are unreliable.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analyzed death certificate data from 1999 to 2015 and found that coroners and medical examiners in many states often did not specify the drug that contributed to the cause of death.
“Coroners are less likely than medical examiners to be physicians and do not necessarily have the medical training needed to complete drug information for death certificates based on toxicology reports,” said lead author Jeanine Buchanich, PhD, who reported the findings in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General.
"Incomplete death certificate reporting hampers the efforts of lawmakers, treatment specialists and public health officials. And the large differences we found between states in the completeness of opioid-related overdose mortality reporting makes it more difficult to identify geographic regions most at risk."
The variability among states was significant - ranging from fewer than 10 unspecified overdose deaths in Vermont to 11,152 in Pennsylvania. States with a decentralized county coroner system or a hybrid system that uses both coroners and medical examiners were more likely to have a high proportion of unspecified overdose deaths.
Overdose deaths are assigned specific "T codes" for each drug found by the coroner or medical examiner. Deaths that can’t be attributed to a specific drug are given the T-code of T50.9 – which means "unspecified drugs, medicaments and biological substances."
Researchers say the widespread use of that code underestimates the actual number of opioid-related deaths. In five states - Alabama, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania - more than 35 percent of the overdose deaths were coded as unspecified.
“Our analyses indicated that potentially more than 70,000 unspecified, unintentional overdose deaths in the past 17 years, including more than 5,600 in 2015, could be categorized as opioid-related unintentional overdose deaths,” said Buchanich.
Questionable Overdose Data
Last year President Trump’s opioid commission urged the federal government to work with states to improve the toxicology data on overdose deaths by developing uniform forensic drug testing.
“We do not have sufficiently accurate and systematic data from medical examiners around the country to determine overdose deaths, both in their cause and the actual number of deaths,” the commission said in its final report.
Critics also say the overdose data reported by the CDC and other federal agencies is often flawed or cherry-picked. CDC recently researchers admitted that many overdoses involving illicit fentanyl and other synthetic black market opioids were erroneously counted as prescription opioid deaths. Toxicology tests cannot distinguish between pharmaceutical fentanyl and illicit fentanyl
The overdoses data is further muddied because multiple drugs are involved in almost half of all drug overdoses. And there is no way to distinguish between deaths caused by legitimate opioid prescriptions and those caused by diverted prescriptions or counterfeit drugs.
A recent report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that drugs used to treat depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions are now involved in more overdoses than opioid pain medication.
The CDC estimates that 63,632 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016 – a 21.5% increase over the 2015 total.
