Prescription drug overdoses have become alarmingly common in the U.S., with opioid painkillers, such as Vicodin and Oxycontin, among the drugs most frequently making headlines.
New research shows another class of drugs — benzodiazepines or “benzos” — is rising in the ranks of overdose deaths, however.
Prescriptions for such drugs, which include brand names Valium, Ativan and Xanax, tripled from 1996 to 2013, but this doesn’t fully account for the uptick in overdoses, which quadrupled during that time period.
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Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York used data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and multiple-cause-of-death data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to describe trends in benzodiazepine prescriptions and overdose deaths.
For starters, they found that the number of U.S. prescriptions for the drugs rose from 4.1 percent in 1996 to 5.6 percent in 2013 — a 37 percent increase.
Further, the rate of overdose deaths increased from 0.58 per 100,000 adults at the start of the study to about 3 per 100,000 adults at the end, which represented a more than 500 percent increase.
As for why the rate of overdose deaths rose faster than the rate of prescriptions, Dr. Chinazo Cunningham, one of the study’s authors, told STAT News, “Our guess is that people are using these prescriptions in a riskier way.”