10 August 2020
By Jessica Hamzelou
Sudden deaths are often assumed to be caused by a failing heart. But about 17 per cent of deaths assumed to be caused by cardiac arrest may actually have resulted from drug overdose, according to a study in San Francisco.
Many of the deaths were linked to the use of opioid drugs. “It indicates that the ‘dark number’ of opioid overdoses may be a lot higher than what we assumed,” says Rebecca McDonald at King’s College London, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Between 2011 and 2017, Zian Tseng at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues performed autopsies on 767 people who had died suddenly in the city. All of the individuals were presumed by emergency medical staff to have died from cardiac arrest, which occurs when the heart stops beating properly, and blood is unable to effectively pump around the body.
Such cases wouldn’t normally undergo an autopsy, but post-mortem toxicology tests revealed that 17 per cent of these individuals actually died from a drug overdose. This was despite the fact that “paramedics had called these cardiac arrests and the [medical examiner] had discovered no evidence of drugs at the scene, and had no suspicion of drug overdose”, says Tseng.
Most of these people were found to have been taking a cocktail of drugs, but the most commonly found drugs were opioids. Just over two-thirds of those found to have died from drug overdose appear to have been taking opioids – and almost half of those individuals had been taking those drugs on prescription.
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tags: drug use, drug abuse
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