Hardly Any Teens Receive Effective Treatment For Opioid Addiction

(Reuters Health) – Just a small fraction of adolescents with opioid addiction will receive medications that can help them quit, new research shows.
These medications, usually methadone or suboxone, are prescribed to reduce craving for opiates and ease withdrawal symptoms, and studies show they help opiate users to abstain. In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised doctors to consider medication-assisted treatment, specifically suboxone, for adolescents with “severe opioid use disorders.”
To get a “baseline” sense of medication-assisted treatment in adolescents with opiate or heroin addiction, Kenneth Feder of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore and his colleagues looked at data on 139,092 patients receiving treatment at publicly funded progr…