Bloomberg News (6/26, Ostrow) reports, “Taking prescription painkillers without a medical need increased 75 percent from 2002 to 2010, and most users were men, according to the first study to look at who is likely to abuse the drugs and how often it occurs.” A research letter published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that men and people between the ages 26 and 49 experienced the greatest increase in prescription medicine abuse, and that over 15,500 people died from overdosing on medicines such as oxycodone — more than twice the number recorded in 2002.

MedPage Today (6/26, Walsh) reports, “To see if this skyrocketing rate of fatal overdoses was accompanied by an overall increase in nonmedical use of these painkillers,” researchers “analyzed data from the annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health. … The analysis showed no increase in the number of people reporting any nonmedical use of prescription painkillers, or use on 1 to 200 days in the past year. But the total number of days of use rose by 35% to 612,829,084 in 2010 from 451,031,411 in 2002.”

According to Medscape (6/26, Fox), the study’s lead author “reports that during the study period, the rate of chronic (at least 200 days per year) nonmedical use of the drugs increased significantly (P < .05), although the overall number of people using these drugs for nonmedical purposes did not change." WebMD (6/26) reports that the "study shows the number of people who abused prescription pain killers for more than 200 days in the last year rose by nearly 75% between 2002-03 and 2009-10." However, "estimates for overall past-year abuse have stayed about the same since 2002." Related Links:

— “Prescription Painkiller Abuse Surged In U.S., Study Finds, “Nicole Ostrow , Bloomberg News, June 25, 2012.

HealthDay (6/23, Holohan) reported, “Teens who engaged in more moderate-to-vigorous outdoor activity reported better health and social functioning than their peers who spent hours in front of television and computer screens,” according to a study published in the July issue of the journal Pediatrics. Of the 1,216 teens studied, those “who had the highest perceived health in the study spent an average of 2.5 hours more per day playing sports or doing other high-intensity activity than their least-active counterparts.” What’s more, “youths in the study overall spent an average of 3.3 hours a day playing video games, watching television or doing other sedentary activities, compared with only 2.1 hours in physical activity.”

Related Links:

— “Active, Outdoor Teens Are Happier Teens: Study, “Ellin Holohan, HealthDay, June 22, 2012.

In a lengthy piece in its magazine section, the New York Times (6/24, MM24, Interlandi, Subscription Publication) reported, “Deinstitutionalization, the systematic closure of state psychiatric hospitals, was codified by the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 and supported by patients’ rights laws secured state by state. Chief among those laws were strict new standards: only people who posed an imminent danger to themselves or someone else could be committed to a psychiatric hospital or treated against their will.” However, “in the decades since, the sickest patients have begun turning up in jails and homeless shelters with a frequency that mirrors that of the late 1800s.” Such patients also end up in the emergency department. The article detailed the story of Joseph Interlandi, the article author’s father and a patient with bipolar disorder who was bounced around between the ED, jail cells, and short-term psychiatric hospitals before finally receiving long-term psychiatric help through a community mental-health center.

Related Links:

— “When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind, “Jeneen Interlandi, , June 22 , 2012.

Reuters (6/21, Norton) reported that according to a data analysis published online May 15 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, report that clinical trials of schizophrenia medications reveal that increasing numbers of participants appear to be responding to the comparison placebos which contain no active medication whatsoever. Researchers at the US Food and Drug Administration arrived at that conclusion after examining 32 clinical trials of pharmaceutical company data submitted to FDA during the years 1991 to 2008. Review author Thomas P. Laughren, MD, pointed out the importance of discovering the reasons why responses to placebo are increasing. The failure likelihood of clinical studies with bigger placebo responses is increased and may discourage pharmaceutical makers from development of new medications for schizophrenia.

Related Links:

— “Rising placebo response seen in schizophrenia trials, “Amy Norton, Reuters, June 21, 2012.

On its front page, the Boston Globe (6/21, A1, Kowalczyk) reports that shared electronic mental health records within Partners HealthCare system has raised privacy issues. According to Dr. David Blumenthal, Partners’ chief health information and innovation officer, “It’s one thing to give your psychiatrist the right to share your information [with certain doctors], it’s another to enter your data into a system that makes it available with relative ease to an unknown number of physicians who may be involved in your care … There are groups who are very uncomfortable with their records being shared with people they have not specifically designated.” Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, the state’s secretary of Health and Human Services, said the new health information exchange will share patient records online across clinicians, “but only with patients’ permission.”

Related Links:

— “As records go online, clash over mental care privacy, “Liz Kowalczyk, The Boston Globe, June 21, 2012.