Prevention of Opioid Overdose

n the time it takes to read this article, at least one person in the United States will have died from an opioid overdose. 1 From 1999 through 2017, more than 700,000 U.S. residents died from a drug overdose; the majority of these events involved an opioid. 2 Among persons between the ages of 24 and 34 years, one in five deaths is now related to opioid use. In this review, we focus on prescriber strategies for overdose prevention in three groups of patients: those who have not received previous opioid therapy, those receiving long-term opioid therapy, and those with an opioid use disorder.