2-News

2 — Tuesday, February 9, 2016
News
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

THREE THINGS YOU 
SHOULD KNOW TODAY

CAMPUS EVENTS & NOTES

3

TUESDAY:

Tents and Tables

THURSDAY:
Twitter Talk

FRIDAY:

Photos of the Week

WEDNESDAY:

In Other Ivory Towers

MONDAY:

This Week in History

TENTS AND TABLES

Voter registration, fundraising

CLAIRE ABDO/Daily

Art & Design freshman Keef Edwards models a hat he 
sewed in his dorm room shop in Bursley Residence Hall 
Monday.

HATS OFF

The 
Michigan 
Daily 
is 

introducing a new rotating item, 
Tents and Tables, that seeks to 
highlight campus activities on 
the Diag and near the posting 
wall in Angell Hall. 

The 
College 
Democrats 

were particularly active with 
the upcoming primary election 
happening March 8. Because 
today was the last day for filing 
absentee ballots, club members 
took 
shifts 
throughout 
the 

day to encourage out-of-state 
students to register to vote.

In an interview, LSA junior 

Brendan Schroder highlighted 
some 
of 
the 
organization’s 

upcoming events, which include 
a sex education event.

“Every Thursday at 8 we 

have an event called KickAss, 
which is where we all get 
together,” he said. “This week 
is a great one because it’s Sex-
Ed KickAss hosted by the Fem 
Dems, which is our women’s 
rights committee.”

Epsilon Nu Tau — a chapter 

of the first entrepreneurship 
fraternity in the United States 
— also tabled in Angell Hall 
to 
promote 
an 
upcoming 

event featuring a hypnotist 
entertainer.

The 
chapter’s 
founder, 

Business senior Alex Weiss, 
helped run the table for part 
of the day. He said the event 
will be the first hosted by the 
fraternity.

“For the first time in our 

history, we’re doing a huge 
campus-wide event,” he said. 
“It’s happening this Friday 
in the Michigan Union in the 
Rogel Ballroom. We’re bringing 
in 
a 
professional 
hypnotist 

entertainer. He’s coming from 
Canada. He’s an alum of the 
University. He’s going to be 
putting on a great show for the 
students. So we’re selling tickets 
to that. It’s going to be a lot of 
fun for anyone who attends.”

He said a goal of the 

organization is to help inspire 
young professionals.

“We help teach young people 

— college students — about 
entrepreneurial principles, help 
them instill an entrepreneurial 
spirit,” he said. “We have a lot of 
fun doing it. We do socials like a 
normal fraternity but we try to 
put an entrepreneurial spin on 
everything we do.”

The University’s chapter of 

Timmy Global Health was also 
stationed in Angell Hall, also 
advertising upcoming activities 
within 
their 
organization. 

According to itswebsite, the 
organization aims to increase 
access 
to 
health 
care 
and 

allow students and volunteers 
to 
address 
global 
health 

challenges.

LSA 
freshman 
Alaina 

Horwood said throughout the 
year, the club holds events on 
campus including a Glow Run, 
a Global Health Symposium 
and benefit dinners in order 
to raise money to send to Mao, 
Dominican Republic.

-LYDIA MURRAY

Study shows prescribing fewer opiods helps reduce overdoses 

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‘U’ researchers 

explore ways doctors 

can assign lower 

doses of strong drugs 

By ALEXA ST. JOHN

Daily Staff Reporter

Giving patients smaller doses 

of prescription opioid painkillers 
may prevent overdoses, according 
to a recent University study.

Opioids, medications often used 

to treat acute pain from surgeries 
and cancer, have also increasingly 
been used in more recent years for 
chronic pain management.

Amy Bohnert, lead author of 

the study and assistant professor 
of psychiatry, said the Center for 
Disease Control and Prevention’s 
guidelines for prescription opioid 
medication have recently begun 
to suggest lower thresholds than 
they have in the past. The current 
guidelines from the CDC have not 
recommended not going above 90 

morphine-equivalent milligrams, 
also called MEM, and encourage 
health care providers to be caution 
once a patient begins to receive or 
go above 50 MEM, according to 
Bohnert.

Additionally, the study found 

the average doses of prescription 
opioids were much higher for 
those who died of an overdose as 
compared to those who survived.

“We found that there was a 

substantial portion of the people 
who died in an opioid overdose,” 
Bohnert said. “Assuming that the 
fact that they were given such 
large quantities influenced the 
fact that they overdosed, had 
their treatment pattern been 
different, had they gotten a lower 
dosage, it could have prevented 
their death.”

Bohnert 
said 
the 
study 

stemmed from the results of 
an original study she worked 
on five years ago. In that study, 
Bohnert said the researchers 
looked at the amount of opioids 
prescribed to specific patients 
and how that related to their 

risk of overdosing on those 
medications. Bohnert said they 
found the greater the amount 
a patient was prescribed, the 
greater their risk of overdose.

The study used date from the 

the Veterans Affairs Ann Arbor 
Healthcare System is a national 
leader when it comes to having the 
type of medical records necessary 
for this research, and is why she 
decided to complete her research 
using their resources. The VA is 
also working with the CDC to 
have a complete match on cause-
specific mortality data.

“We found that the rate of 

unintentional overdose, by any 
substance, not just prescription 
opioids, is twice as high in VA 
patients than it is in the general 
population, after you account for 
differences in age and sex.”

According to the CDC, the rate 

of deaths from drug overdoses, 
specifically overdoses involving 
opioids, has increased 200 percent 
since 2000. 

Each day, 46 people die from 

an overdose of prescription opioid 

or narcotic painkillers in the 
United States, the CDC also 
reported. In 2012, reportedly 
259 million prescriptions for 
painkillers were written by 
health care providers, equaling 
enough for every American 
adult to have a bottle of the 

medication.

Bohnert said the findings that 

there have been more prescription 
opioid overdoses recently than in 
previous years has resulted from 
changes in the way prescription 
opioid medication has been used, 
as the medication is now applied 
to both acute and chronic pain.

In the study, the researchers 

changed 
the 
design 
from 

the 
original 
study 
Beohnert 

conducted five years ago, she 
said. Rather than taking an 
entire population of patients 
who were prescribed opioids, 
she said the researchers looked 
at patients who were identified 
as having died of a prescription 
opioid overdose, and were being 
prescribed opioids at the time 
that they died.

The researchers then created 

a 
comparison 
group, 
whose 

members were matched to patients 
in the original study basedon 
criteria such as demographics, 
clinical 
characteristics 
and 

treatment characteristics.

“What you’re prescribed as 

a patient should be tailored to 
what your needs are and the 
way in which you are unique, so 
hopefully by matching like we 
did, we’re making a much more 
accurate comparison,” Bohnert 
said. “By doing that, we still 
found that there were substantial 

differences between people in 
terms of opioid doses, between 
people who died of an overdose 
and their matched comparison 
group.”

While the average dose for 

people who died of an overdose 
was almost 100 MEM, in the 
comparison group with patients 
who did not die of an overdose, the 
average dose prescribed was less 
than 50 MEM.

Bohnert said there is additional 

preview data supporting the idea 
that if a patient is prescribed a 
higher dose of a prescription opioid 
medication, they are more likely 
to develop problems with the 
substance, which could lead to risky 
patterns of behavior associated 
with the substance that could lead 
to overdose, Bohnert said.

Additionally, because patients 

often develop tolerance when 
they use opioids, they have to 
use more of the medication 
to 
feel 
the 
same 
effects. 

As a patient gets to higher 
doses, they can also develop 
tolerance to the medication’s 
respiratory depression effects, 
she noted, a patient has to use 
more medication to cause an 
overdose, and maybe prescribed 
higher doses. As a result of their 
growing tolerance, they are 
more likely to have received 
more medication. 

With more on hand, it is much 

easier to overdose, Bohnert said.

“The solution to this is going 

to require a lot of different 
interventions,” Bohnert said. “One 
of them is that prescribers are 
becoming increasingly cautious 
about escalating doses to higher 
levels.”

However, Bohnert said that does 

not address how to help patients 
who are already on high doses and 
exhibiting signs showing they are 
at risk for adverse outcomes with 
the medications.

Bohnert said there have already 

been programs to help decrease 
these patients’ dosages, but that 
there needs to be more research 
done to understand how to learn 
how 
these 
programs 
might 

dangerously impacts the patients’ 
risk for bad outcomes.

She noted there is some 

controversy 
about 
whether 

other medications are better or 
should be recommended over 
opioids. However, there are risks 
to patients takingnonsteroidal 
anti-inflammatory 
drugs, 

common pain-relieving drugs, 
as well, she said. Many non-
pharmacological options, such as 
physical therapy and cognitive-
behavioral therapy, for pain that 
overall have less risks and future 
research could be focused, she 
added. 

commonly used illicit drug, 

with a total of 19.8 million 
past-month users in the United 
States.

“I hope that current and 

potential users will consider 
the potential long-term effects 
of 
marijuana 
use 
on 
their 

brain health, particularly their 
cognitive 
functioning 
when 

deciding to use or not to use,” 
Levine said. 

In 
an 
interview, 
LSA 

sophomore Jason, who smokes 
marijuana 
regularly 
and 

requested to be referred to 
by only his first name, said 
the results of the study do 

not impact his perceptions on 
marijuana use. 

“I really don’t see marijuana 

as a serious risk to my health 
short- 
or 
long-term,” 
Jason 

said. “It may affect my ability to 
remember a given list of words, 
according to one specific study, 
but ultimately I don’t see it as a 
barrier to my overall success in 
life or health overall.”

There 
were 
3,385 

participants, 84.3 percent of 
whom 
reported 
marijuana 

use and 11.6 percent of whom 
continued to use marijuana 
into middle age. From the 
data, Levine concluded that 
an average of one out of two 
participants remembered one 
fewer word from a list of 15 
words, for every five years of 

past exposure to marijuana.

Levine 
said 
that 
this 

statistic is significant, but the 
investigation of the effects of 
marijuana 
consumption 
on 

cognitive function is ongoing.

“Additional research would 

be needed to demonstrate the 
clinical effects of decreased 
verbal memory in individual day 
to day functioning,” Levine said.

It still remains unknown as 

to whether occasional or low-
intensity marijuana use earlier 
in life has long-term effects, and 
whether factors such as age and 
duration of exposure have to be 
taken into account.

Jason said he did not believe 

verbal memory loss was a life-
threatening issue.

“I haven’t looked too far into 

the research,” Jason said. “But 
verbal memory isn’t threatening 
to my life and I assume that I’ll 
slow down my consumption of 
marijuana over the course of my 
life.”

Self-reporting was utilized to 

assess the results of the study, 
which is sometimes considered 
a less reliable method of study, 
but Levine said this was not a 
primary issue for the research 
team.

“Self-report 
of 
marijuana 

use is the gold standard and 
customary 
approach 
for 

measuring 
an 
individual’s 

marijuana use,” Levine said. 
“I do not feel that it is a major 
limitation.”

MARIJUANA
From Page 1

The mayor of Hawaii 
declared 
a 
state 

of 
emergency 
on 

the island in response to 
increased reports of denuge 
fever, CBS News reported. 
Denuge is transmitted from 
the same mosquitos which 
cause the Zika virus. 

2

WCED Greece 
lecture

WHAT: Yale University 
Professor Statis N. Kalvyas 
will present information 
on the Greek financial 
crisis and its impact on the 
Eurozone.
WHO: Center for European 
Studies
WHEN: Today from 4 
p.m. to 5:30 p.m. 
WHERE: School of Social 
Work, Room 1636

Biology 
lecture series

WHAT: MIT professor 
JoAnne Stubbe will give 
the 7th annual G. Robert 
Greenberg lecture in 
biological chemistry.
WHO: Department of 
Biological Chemistry
WHEN: Today from 
12 p.m. to 1 p.m. 
WHERE: Medical Science 
Unit II, North Lecture Hall

Wheaton College Prof. 
Larycia 
Hawkins 
has 

agreed 
to 
leave 
the 

institution 
after 
being 

investigated for comments 
regarding 
Islam 
and 

Christianity, the New York 
Times reported. Hawkins 
was tenured at the college. 

1

Guest master 
class

WHAT: Dimitri Murrath, 
an award-winning and 
renowned musician, 
will offer a free lesson 
in perfecting viola-
players’ techniques.
WHO: School of Music, 
Theatre & Dance
WHEN: Today at 7 p.m.
WHERE: Earl V. Moore 
Building, Glenn E. 

Clerking for 
the Supremes

WHAT: Three former 
Supreme Court law clerks 
and faculty members of the 
Law school will share their 
experiences in the position.
WHO: Department of 
Sociology
WHEN: Today from 5:45 
p.m. to 8 a.m.
WHERE: LSA Building, 
Room 4154 

Sexual health 
conference

WHAT: Today is the first 
day of Sexpertise, a three-
day conference that engages 
the campus to explore 
sexuality and relationships.
WHO: University Health 
Service
 WHEN: Today from 6:30 
p.m. to 10 p.m. 
WHERE: Michigan 

Inclusivity 
guest speaker 

WHAT: Lee Gill, 
University of Akron’s chief 
diversity officer, will discuss 
the University’s diversity. 
WHO: Multi-Ethnic 
Student Affairs 
WHEN: Today from 
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. 
WHERE: Rackham 
Graduate School, 
Amphitheater

Concert recital

WHAT: John Sampen, 
a distinguished concert 
saxophonist, will 
perform compositions.
WHO: School of Music, 
Theatre & Dance
WHEN: Today at 8 p.m.
WHERE: Stamps 
Auditorium
Please report any error in 
the Daily to corrections@
michigandaily.com.

React to Film 

WHAT: “3 1/2 Minutes, 
Ten Bullets,” a film that 
depicts the death of a 
young, Black male. The 
film discusses the racial 
climate in the United States 
follows.
WHO: Department of 
American Culture
WHEN: Today from 8 
p.m. to 10 p.m.
WHERE: North Quad, 
Room 2435

President Obama will 
ask Congress for $1.8 
billion to help combat 
the Zika virus and 

fund research for treatment, 
Reuters 
reported. 
There 

are currently no vaccines 
or treatments for the virus, 
but most infected people 
only have mild symptoms. 

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