Wall Street Journal
by Timothy W. Martin
2 Jul 13

Overdose deaths in the U.S. from highly addictive opioid painkillers rose more sharply among women than men in the past decade, according to a government study released Tuesday.

Prescription pain pills, such as oxycodone or hydrocodone, were involved in 6,631 overdose deaths, intentional and unintentional, among women in 2010, a 415% increase from the 1,287 such deaths in 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During the same period, the number of such painkiller overdose deaths among men rose 265% to 10,020, the CDC said.

Overdoses from all types of drugs accounted for 34% of suicides for women in 2010, with opioid painkillers accounting for nearly one in every 10 intentional deaths, the CDC said. By contrast, overdoses were blamed for just 8% of all suicides of men.

"Many people have become addicted, because of the large number of prescriptions being written," said CDC Director Thomas Frieden in a teleconference with reporters. He called the painkiller problems among women "underrecognized" by health-care professionals.

Painkiller overdoses among both sexes caused more deaths in 2010 than heroin and cocaine combined, according to the CDC.

Some 100 million Americans—roughly one-third of the population—say they have chronic pain, with estimates that the resulting lost productivity and direct treatment cost more than $560 billion annually, according to a 2011 report by the Institute of Medicine, an independent body that advises the U.S. government on medical issues.

Women deal with higher rates of some specific types of pain than men. Migraines, for example, are up to three times more prevalent among women. Women report having fibromyalgia, a type of widespread musculoskeletal pain, at a rate six times higher than men, said Roger B. Fillingim, a behavioral scientist at the University of Florida who has researched how the two genders react to pain.

CDC researchers compiled the study by analyzing data from the National Vital Statistics system from 1999 to 2010 and figures from the Drug Abuse Warning Network from 2004 to 2010.

The soaring number of painkiller overdoses was proportional to the growth in the number of painkillers prescribed, CDC officials said.

Painkillers can be lethal when combined with other drugs or alcohol, or if they are abused by inhaling, swallowing or injecting the innards of a powerful opioid at once—instead of how the pills are designed to be released, over several hours.

More than 940,000 women went to hospital emergency rooms for drug misuse or abuse in 2010, the CDC said. Men totaled 1.2 million such visits.

Minority women had higher rates of drug overdose deaths and emergency-room visits than white women, which could be explained by variability in the metabolism of opioids, said David Craig, a pharmacist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., who is a spokesman for the American Pain Society, a group of medical professionals.

Mr. Craig also said that "differences in body weight and drug metabolism in women versus men could explain [the CDC] findings."

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