CHICAGO — Only one in four teens and young adults with opioid addiction receive recommended treatment medication even with good health insurance, according to a study that suggests doctors are not keeping up with the needs of youth caught up in the worst addiction crisis in U.S. history.
“Young people may be dying because they are not getting the treatment they need,” said Brendan Saloner, an addiction researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who wrote an editorial published with the study Monday in JAMA Pediatrics.
Researchers looked at records for nearly 21,000 patients ages 13 to 25 from one large insurance carrier, UnitedHealthcare.
All were diagnosed with opioid addiction, but only 27 percent were given buprenorphine or naltrexone during 2001-2014, years when addiction was soaring.
“The take-home message for parents is: If you have a child struggling with opioid addiction, understand that there are medications that support and sustain recovery,” said study author Dr. Scott Hadland of Boston Medical Center.
Hadland was following a hunch when he began the study last year. In his practice, he was seeing more young people addicted to opioids. Many already had been through multiple treatment programs and they told him they had never before been offered treatment medication.
DISPARITIES FOR SUBGROUPS
Doctors must become more comfortable treating addiction with medications, Hadland said, noting that buprenorphine and naltrexone are recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
