The prescribing rate for long-acting/extended-release opioid pain relievers in Maine, which is the highest in the country, is more than five times higher than that of Texas, which has the lowest rate, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
Maine’s prescribing rate for long-acting/extended-release opioid pain relievers (LA/ER OPRs) was 21.8 per 100 persons in 2012, compared with 4.2 per 100 in Texas, making Maine’s rate 5.2 times higher. Delaware had the second-highest LA/ER OPR rate – just behind Maine at 21.7 per 100. After Texas, the next-lowest state was Illinois, which had a prescribing rate of 5.2 per 100, according to CDC investigators (MMWR 2014;63:563-7).
The national rate for LA/ER OPRs was 10.3 per 100 persons, or about 12.5% of the total 258.9 million opioid prescriptions written in 2012. By region, the Northeast was the highest at 12.6 per 100, followed by the South (10.2), the West (9.6), and the Midwest (9.3), they said.
The CDC researchers defined LA/ER OPRs "as those that should be taken only two or three times a day, such as methadone, OxyContin [oxycodone], and Opana [oxymorphone] ER." The analysis was based on a sample of approximately 57,000 pharmacies from IMS Health’s National Prescription Audit that "dispense nearly 80% of the retail prescriptions in the United States," they wrote.
