AATOD has been increasingly concerned about the impact of prescription opioid use has had upon admissions to methadone treatment programs. Over the course of the past several years, we have received anecdotal reports from State Methadone Authorities, county governments and methadone treatment programs with regard to the admission of patients, suffering from long-term prescription opioid addiction.

AATOD has developed a research project through a grant from Purdue Pharma. This three-year Opioid Use Study, which will involve 75 treatment programs, representing all of the regions in the United States, will be the first longitudinal trend analysis to evaluate the prevalence of prescription opioid abuse among new admissions to methadone treatment programs. Each of the participating programs will provide an anonymous survey instrument to every patient being admitted into the program.

The information collected from the survey instrument will be analyzed independently by the National Development and Research Institute (NDRI) a leading and a nationally recognized research based organization. All of the survey data will be forwarded to NDRI to ensure complete independence of survey data collection and analysis. NDRI will track these data on a quarterly basis and will be responsible for publishing all such information in making presentations at national and international conferences.

Project Update

AATOD began collecting data from 71 programs in 32 states, beginning on January 2, 2005 following field testing in five treatment settings. Each of the participating programs provided a survey to patients being admitted to the program and each patient made a voluntary decision to participate by completing the survey questionnaire.

We collected 7,435 patient surveys from the participating OTPs between January -December 11, 2005. Seventy-one programs were actively involved in submitting information to NDRI, representing 32 states in every region of the United States.

We have already learned a tremendous amount of information from this study. Some of the critical early findings of this past year have been that 71% of the reporting patients are Caucasian. Additionally, 46% of the patients indicated employment as their primary source of income.

Approximately 2,500 of the 7,400 patients were in the age range of 18-29, representing a younger population entering treatment.

Equally significant, 38% of patients reported having moderate to severe chronic pain. 35% of the patients reported bodily pain as a reason for enrollment in methadone treatment programs.

We also learned that 78% of the patients injected heroin as their primary drug of abuse, while 35% were injecting prescription opioids.

We will continue to collect information from a greater number of programs in 2006, bringing the total number of reporting programs to 75. We anticipate another 7,500-8,000 patients to be involved in this study as well.