Investigating the impact of prescribed opioids, benzodiazepines on veterans
Are veterans who simultaneously take opioids for chronic pain and benzodiazepines for anxiety and insomnia at an increased risk of unintentional overdose and death as well as suicide?
Nearly 17 veterans die by suicide each day in the United States, a statistic that has led the Department of Veterans Affairs to make suicide prevention its highest priority and to recognize the risks from the simultaneous use of opioids and benzodiazepines. To tackle the issue, the VA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) to convene a committee of experts to evaluate the effects of opioid and benzodiazepine use on all-cause mortality of U.S. veterans, including suicide.
The committee, chaired by Brian Strom, the chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, will quantify the effects of opioid and benzodiazepine prescribing on the risk of death among veterans who received care from the VA between 2007 and 2019. In their analysis, the committee will focus on the effect of opioid prescribing for pain, relative to alternative non-opioid pain treatments; the effects of higher doses relative to lower doses of opioids; the effect of co-prescribing a benzodiazepine among patients already receiving opioids, relative to alternative treatments for anxiety and other indications for benzodiazepines; and the effect of initiating opioids among patients already taking benzodiazepines.
In 2019, Strom served as chair for a similar but separately funded NASEM committee that developed protocols that this committee will be considering.
The study is congressionally mandated through the Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act (Hannon Act) of 2019, which broadens mental health care and suicide prevention programs that will effectively evaluate and treat mental health conditions for veterans.
The committee will research and deliberate on this issue and hopes to release the report within the next two years.
