Children of opioid users twice as likely to receive prescriptions themselves

Credit: Getty Images/Liderina

By Olivia Bowthorpe

Young people whose parents are prescribed opioids are more than twice as likely to be given opioid prescriptions themselves, according to research from Norway.

Writing in PLOS Medicine, the authors said that pain in adolescents was often managed pharmacologically, despite a “lack of evidence about its efficacy for non-malignant pain in this population".1