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THURSDAY, July 21, 2016
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NATIONAL NEWS
Approach to opioid addiction gets nod GEORDON OMAND
THE CANADIAN PRESS
VANCOUVER — A made-in-Canada approach to treating opioid addiction is garnering positive international attention from one of the world’s most widely circulated medical publications. The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a review of guidelines developed by a pair of health authorities in British Columbia aimed at educating health-care providers about how best to treat opioid-use disorder. One of the guidelines’ authors, Dr. Keith Ahamad, said the protocols are the first to provide an evidence-based, gradual approach for how family doctors can best
help someone addicted to opioids. He said they suggest doing away with some traditional strategies that were found to be ineffective or even harmful. The recommendations include discouraging rapid detoxification as a remedy and encouraging the use of suboxone, rather than methadone, as a first-line treatment. Suboxone is a mixture of two drugs and has been shown in studies to be six times safer than methadone, Ahamad said. Dr. Evan Wood chaired the committee responsible for developing the guidelines and said the medical journal’s recognition will hopefully generate interest and focus attention on the need to modernize addictions treatment. “We spend huge money on the consequences of addiction, but we haven’t tradi-
tionally made the investments in a thoughtful approach to the prevention and effective treatment of addiction,’’ he said. “Hopefully, we’re beginning to turn the corner with that.’’ Vancouver Coastal Health and Providence Health released the Guideline for the Clinical Management of Opioid Addiction in November 2015, several months before a surge in illicit drug deaths prompted B.C.’s chief doctor to declare a public-health emergency. Ahamad hopes attention from the American Medical Association’s journal will provide both validation and attention to the B.C. guidelines and contribute to their adoption elsewhere. “Right now the reality is [that] across the country, patients with addiction are bounc-
ing in and out of family doctors’ offices,’’ he said. “We need at that moment to give them the treatment that they need that can potentially save their lives, no different than treating blood pressure and diabetes.’’ Data from the B.C. Coroners Service show there were 371 illicit drug overdose deaths in the province in the first half of 2016, a nearly 75 per cent increase over the same period last year. The deadly opioid fentanyl was detected in more than half of those cases, about a two-fold increase from the previous year. The Journal of the American Medical Association estimates there are about 2.5-million people in the United States with opioid addiction and that nearly 29,000 died in 2014 as a result of an opioid overdose.
Link between laid-off Canadians and enrolment ANDY BLATCHFORD
THE CANADIAN PRESS
OTTAWA — A new Statistics Canada study says there are significant correlations between job layoffs and full-time enrolment in post-secondary education. To help illustrate its findings, the report released Tuesday said men who lost their jobs in 2008 — at
the start of the recession — were five times more likely to register for post-secondary education than those who weren’t laid off. The research found 3.1 per cent of men who lost their jobs that year went back to school on a full-time basis. In contrast, only 0.6 per cent of men who didn’t lose their jobs between 2001 and 2011 enrolled in
full-time, post-secondary schooling. Among women laid off in 2008, 3.1 per cent of them enrolled full time in a post-secondary institution, compared with one per cent of women who didn’t lose their jobs between 2001 and 2011. The goal of the paper was to take a closer look at how people respond after losing their job, or even when they anticipate a pos-
sible layoff. “While it is well documented that many displaced workers experience substantial and persistent earnings losses, the extent to which they enrol in [post-secondary] institutions after job loss remains — to a large extent — unknown,’’ said the report, co-authored by Wen Ci, Marc Frenette and Rene Morissette. “The substantial increases in
full-time enrolment observed among men and women displaced in 2008 suggest that adult workers respond to job loss by enrolling full time in [post-secondary] institutions.’’ The study also found that, in general, workers laid off between 2001 to 2011 were two to four percentage points more likely than other workers to go to school.