United States: Latest reports suggest, after years of steady increase in opioid overdoses, in 2023, overdose deaths dropped by three percent. This is the first annual decline since 2018.
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The new study reveals how higher use of naloxone by non-professionals – or people with little or no medical experience – might be one of the reasons for this trend.
Increasing access to naloxone, a versatile drug to treat opioid overdose commonly sold under the name Narcan, has been another emphasis on increasing layperson responder efforts, 6abc.com reported.
What has the new study reported?
The new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open on Monday reveals that from June 2020 to June 2022, emergency medical services received 744,078 patients who received naloxone across America.
The authors established that the mean percentage of naloxone administrations documented by EMS declined by 6.1 percent in this period, while the proportion of people who received the drug from bystanders before the arrival of EMS rose by 43.5 percent.
Naloxone, which is sold in the form of nasal mist, works by counteracting the effects that opioids have on the body.
In some cases, overdose causes the breathing to reduce or stop; the medicine brings back the breathing within two to three minutes in most cases with only one dose.
But the medical advisors say any time someone is overdosing, one should call the emergency number 911 since they might equally need medical assistance even after administering the naloxone, 6abc.com reported.
New CDC data indicates that the count of fatal overdoses in the US has reduced as much as 10 percent over the past year, part of a recent downward trend.
The updated study’s “significant increase” in layperson naloxone administration reveals that the drug is no longer exclusively used by the sector since it has transitioned into a bigger role in the fight against the opioid crisis through the provision of the medication to people and actionable establishment normalizer before official help does arrive.