More children and working-age Americans are going without prescription drugs because of cost concerns, according to a new national study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). In 2007, one in seven Americans under age 65 reported not filling a prescription in the previous year because they couldn't afford the medication, up from one in 10 in 2003. Rising prescription drug costs ...

BACKGROUND Commentaries on the adequacy of insurance coverage for prescription drugs available to Canadians have emphasized differences in the coverage provided by different provincial governments. Less is known about the actual financial burden of prescription drug spending and how this burden varies by province of residence, affluence and source of primary drug coverage. METHODS We used dat...

Using 2002 Canadian Community Health Survey data, this paper examines the effect of public and private prescription drug insurance on the utilization of psychotropic and non-psychotropic drugs. It is found that prescription drug utilization is characterized by two stochastic regimes requiring use of latent class modelling framework. In many instances, results differ for the classes of high and ...

It is critical that issues surrounding the abuse and misuse of prescription opioids be balanced with the need for these medications for the treatment of pain. One way to decrease the abuse of prescription opioid medications is to develop abuse deterrent formulations (or ADFs) that in some way prevent drug abusers from extracting out the active ingredient in order to employ alternate routes of a...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To define, among a sample of college students, the nature and extent of nonmedical use of prescription stimulants (NPS), including both overuse and use of someone else's drug, for attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); to characterize NPS among individuals not medically using a prescription stimulant for ADHD; and to determine whether NPS and overuse of a medically pre...

OBJECTIVES To describe benzodiazepine and prescription opioid use by clients of drug treatment services and the sources of pharmaceuticals they use. DESIGN Structured face-to-face interviews on unsanctioned use of benzodiazepines and prescription opioids were conducted between January and July 2008. PARTICIPANTS Convenience sample of treatment entrants who reported regular (an average of ≥ ...

In the US prescription drug costs are rising faster than any other component of health care expenditures, and show no signs of slowing. Spending on prescription drugs has been estimated by the Health Care Finance Administration (HCFA) to be rising by approximately 12% per year, more than twice the rate for national health care expenditures (5.1%). Factors driving the rise in prescription drug c...

Overview Prescription drug abuse, misuse and overdoses are on the rise. In 2010, drug overdoses killed 38,329 Americans, 16,651 of whom died from prescription opioid painkillers such as oxycodone, hydrocodone and methadone. These drugs also were responsible for 420,040 emergency room visits in 2011. Opioid painkiller deaths have increased in lockstep with prescription opioid prescribing, and th...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES There has been a limited focus on prescription drug abuse among women in the country. Choice of psychoactive substance, reasons for initiation and co-occurring disorders have been found to be different among men and women. The current study was aimed at studying the profile of female patients seeking in-patient treatment for prescription drug use over a period of five ye...