Preventing sensationalistic science and fake news about substance use
- PDF / 314,869 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 34 Downloads / 164 Views
EDITORIAL
Open Access
Preventing sensationalistic science and fake news about substance use Stephan Arndt1,2,3* and De Shauna Jones1
Case 1 I recently read that 14–22% of all pregnancies in the United States were complicated by use of prescription opioid medications. This was in a newsletter [1] referencing a paper in the BMJ [2]. The newsletter description goes on to say that an infant showing signs of opioid withdrawal is born every 25 min. Despite their proximity, the two statistics represent different things. A reader might easily take this statement to suggest that about one in five births are complicated by opioid use. We were reasonably surprised by that and so read the original article. Interestingly, results of the referenced paper by Huybrechts et al. [2] indicated no such thing. Instead, the statement in the newsletter referencing 14 to 22% was in Huybrechts et al’s [2] introduction and was attributed to two previous papers (reference numbers 3 and 4). One of the first source papers
suggested that 14.4% of women were prescribed opioid medication at some point in their pregnancy [3] while the other reference found that 22% of Medicaid women were prescribed opioids at some point in their pregnancy [4]. Note that these first source references suggest the 9month prevalence of receiving an opioid medication during pregnancy and do not propose that the resulting birth suffered opioid withdrawal or that there were any complications. The article, referenced by the newsletter [2], found that only 2.3% of births from women receiving opioid medication during their last trimester suffered discernable withdrawal. Therefore, the actual percentage of births suffering from withdrawal would be 0.023 times either 0.14 or 0.22 depending on whether we used the first sources’ estimates of 14.4% or 22%. Either of these calculations result in an estimate of less than 1% (0.3312% or 0.506%) and not 14 to 22%. Given that the periods of prescription were different for the source papers (9 months) and the article reference by the newsletter (3 months), the prevalence of births complicated by opioids is likely lower. The statement that the one infant is born every 25 min came from another study [5] suggesting that neonatal abstinence syndrome rose from 0.34% to 0.58% between 2009 to 2012. This is similar to the estimate in the previous paragraph, 0.3312% or 0.506%, but a far cry from the estimates in the newsletter [1] and its referenced paper’s introduction [2], "14-22% of pregnancies are complicated due to the use of prescription opioid medications". The only way this can be interpreted as a correct statement is to define any opioid medication taken at any time during pregnancy as a complication. If the initially referenced authors and newsletter were equating any opioid prescription as a complication, then the equivalence was not transparent.
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Iowa Consortium for Substance Abuse Research and Evaluation, University of Iowa, 100 MTP4, Iowa City, IA 52245-5000, USA 2 Department of Psy
Data Loading...
