The Detroit Free Press (5/8, Kovanis) reports on a study published in the JAMA Psychiatry which found that buprenorphine treatment is prescribed 35 times more frequently to white patients. The article says that the findings are “especially interesting because research revealed earlier this year showed a spike in the number of African American deaths tied to fentanyl, the ultra powerful opioid that’s being cut into heroin, cocaine and other drugs.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer (5/8, Whelan) reports that the study examined over 13 million doctors’ visits during which the drug was prescribed from 2012 through 2015, and “found that 12.7 million of those visits were by white patients, compared to just 363,000 for all other races.”

HealthDay (5/8, Preidt) reports that investigators found “a large increase in the overall number of buprenorphine prescriptions written at outpatient clinic visits over the previous decade, but a decrease in the percentage of those visits where the patients were black.”

Related Links:

— “Poor, Minorities Shortchanged on Opioid Addiction Treatments, ” Robert Preidt, HealthDay, May , 2019

Kaiser Health News (5/7, Dembosky) reports that methamphetamine use “is surging in parts of the US, particularly the West,” but policymakers “haven’t kept up, continuing to direct the bulk of funding and attention to opioids.” According to UCLA addiction psychologist Steve Shoptaw, stories regarding methamphetamine overdoses “are very much muffled by the much louder story about the opioid epidemic” among congressional lawmakers. Deaths related to methamphetamine use in San Francisco have doubled since 2011, and the city’s meth-related emergency room visits “have jumped 600% to 1,965 visits in 2016, the last year for which ER data is available.”

Related Links:

— “Meth Vs. Opioids: America Has Two Drug Epidemics, But Focuses On One, “April Dembosky, Kaiser Health News, May 7, 2019

Reuters (5/6, Rapaport) reports that “transgender adolescents may be less likely to be sexually assaulted when they can use school bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth,” according to a study published online in Pediatrics.

Related Links:

— “Trans teens face higher sexual assault risk when schools restrict bathrooms, “Lisa Rapaport, Reuters, May 6, 2019

The New York Times (5/7, Lucchesi) reports that “mental health experts now recognize that PTSD can indeed affect nurses, both military and civilian.” Specifically, “as many as 28 percent of nurses experience PTSD at some point in their careers, said Meredith Mealer, an associate professor at the Anschutz Medical Campus at the University of Colorado, Denver, though health care providers still often struggle to treat it.” One “recent study in the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation found as many as 48 percent of nurses working in a critical care transplant unit met the criteria for PTSD symptoms included upsetting dreams about a traumatic event, difficulty falling asleep, irritability or outbursts of anger, and upsetting memories about the event that arose against the person’s will.”

Related Links:

— “For Nurses, Trauma Can Come With the Job, “Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, The New York Times, May 7, 2019

Healio (5/6, Demko) reports that “history of engaging in injurious violence in the six months before baseline assessment and recent violent victimization were the most powerful predictors of later injurious violent behavior in individuals with schizophrenia,” researchers concluded after examining “18-month data from 1,435 individuals with schizophrenia who participated in the NIMH’s Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) study.” The findings were published online April 24 in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “History of violence, victimization predicts later violence in schizophrenia, “Savannah Demko, Healio, May 6, 2019