NIH Issues New Plan To Tackle Opioid Crisis

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

opioids pain planEarlier today, the National Institutes of Health issued its new plan for taking on the opioid crisis in America. The plan is titled Helping to End Addiction Long-term, or HEAL. The plan has two main goals:

  • Fund projects that will help develop or facilitate treatments for opioid addiction and overdose.
  • Fund projects that are meant to improve the management of pain through research into how acute pain transitions to chronic pain, as well as research nonaddictive pain treatments.

“Like most other pioneering scientific initiatives, HEAL will focus on a range of objectives, from short-term goals to research priorities that will take longer to bear fruit,” the authors wrote. “Yet, all will be aimed at the same ultimate vision: a nation of people with far less disabling pain and opioid addiction.”

Treating Addiction and Overdose

For starters, researchers want to take a closer look at how we’re currently battling addiction and overdose. Through their research, they found that there are three main drugs prescribed to help wean people off of opioids. Researchers found that most people living with opioid addiction never get started on these treatments, and of those that do, half of them relapse within a year.

“Research to reformulate these medications to improve adherence, as well as to develop new, more flexible therapies, is needed to help those who have opioid use disorder,” the authors wrote.

The NIH also wants to fund efforts to create better drugs for reversing overdoses, especially among individuals who overdose on fentanyl. The current reversal drug is naloxone, and it isn’t as effective as experts want it to be when the overdoser has other drugs or alcohol in their system.

Treating Addiction Before It Starts

The second part of the initiative focuses on coming up with better pain treatment plans and stopping pain before it become chronic. This is what we’ve been championing for on the blog for years. We need to treat addiction at the source, and the underlying reason behind addiction is unaddressed pain. We need to find better ways to treat and manage pain conditions so they don’t progress to the point where opioids are needed.

Funding for both parts of the plan will come from a $500 million grant that Congress set aside for the NIH in the 2018 budget