Two studies suggest some cautious good news for the opioid epidemic

The opioid epidemic may finally be on the decline, at least among younger people and prescription painkillers, two studiespublished last week in the medical journal Pediatricssuggest.The studieswhich werefunded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicatethatteen prescription opioid use and poisonings have declined over last several years.One of the studies, which tracked teen prescription opioid use between 1976 and 2015, found that teen use began declining in 2013. While use has fluctuated over the period of the study ' which surveyed students in135 public and privatehigh schools across the country' it reached peaks in 1989 and 2002.The study authors suggested that the most recent decline in prescription opioid use coincided with similar declines in prescribing in the US over the same time period.The study authors found one other troubling data point that indicates the effect prescribing has had on the crisis: non-medical use of prescription opioids was almost always preceded by a legitimate prescription."It is our hope that these declines are due to careful prescribing practices and enhanced monitoring of prescription opioids among adolescents that will eventually translate to a reduction in negative opioid-related consequences, such as overdoses," Sean Esteban McCabe, a research professor at the University of Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center and the lead author of the study, told WGBH News.Overprescription of painkillers.is commonly considered one of the main drivers of the current opioid crisis, as Business Insider's Harrison Jacobs has reported.Over the past decade, the US has suffered rising rates of prescription and illicit opioid use, leading to skyrocketing deaths from drug overdoses. In December, the CDC also reported that 52,404 people died from drug overdoses in 2015. Young people have been hit hard by the crisis ' between 1997 and 2012,opioid poisonings among those aged under19 increased by 161 percent,according to a 2016 Yale University study.A second study in Pediatrics examined188,468 prescription opioid exposures at poison control centers for people under20 from 2000 through 2015.Using data from theNational Poison Data System, the researchers found that youth exposuresof opioids has been going down since 2009 for all butbuprenorphine, an opioid commonly used to treat addiction.Between 2009 and 2015, the rate of children of all ages poisoned by opioids fell by slightly more than30 percent. It is still higher than it was in 2000 however.Study author Dr. Marcel Casavant, the chief of toxicology at Nationwide Children's Hospital and medical director of the Central Ohio Poison Center in Columbus, Ohio cautioned to Reuters that the study only accounts for opioid exposures that resulted in calls to poison centers, not all exposures, and thus is an incomplete picture. One factor for the decrease not accounted for in the study is a potential rise in heroin use in recent years, which many studies have reported.Join the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: Here's why barns are painted red
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