Research finding · April 2024
Different treatments for opioid use disorder impact suicide mortality rates
Treating opioid use disorder (OUD) with opioid agonist treatments that work to prevent withdrawal and reduce cravings, such as methadone and buprenorphine, has been shown to be an effective approach in reducing mortality from all causes, overdose mortality, and suicide mortality. However, due to differences in requirements for getting treatment –– methadone requires daily visits to a dispensing facility while buprenorphine can be received with weekly or monthly prescriptions –– there has been a push to compare these two treatment approaches.
To look at potential differences between these two approaches, Dr. Bradley Watts collected data from 61,997 US Department of Veteran Affairs patients with a diagnosis of OUD who received opioid agonist treatment between 2010 and 2019. After analyzing the data, Dr. Watts found significantly lower all-cause mortality and suicide mortality rates for patients who received buprenorphine treatment compared to methadone. These results support the less restrictive prescribing practices of buprenorphine treatment for OUD.
Citation: Gottlieb, D. J., Shiner, B., Hoyt, J. E., Riblet, N. B., Peltzman, T., Teja, N., & Watts, B. V. (2023). A comparison of mortality rates for buprenorphine versus methadone treatments for opioid use disorder. Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica, 147(1), 6–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/acps.13477
This finding comes from an AFSP-funded study — see the grant below ↓
