Mid-lifers most likely to have injected drugs

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Injection drug use is becoming less common among young people in the U.S., especially blacks, a new analysis of national data shows.

In fact, middle-aged men and women are more likely to have ever injected drugs than younger people -- or older people, for that matter -- Dr. Gregory Armstrong of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta found.

"These observations ... may challenge conventional stereotypes of injection drug users," Armstrong writes in the Archives of Internal Medicine. He wants doctors to be aware that "that injection drug users are a heterogeneous group and that, on average, they are no longer young."

To understand trends in injection drug use among Americans, Armstrong analyzed data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse for 1979 through 2002.

He found that 1.5 percent of people surveyed in 2000-2002, an estimated 3.4 million people, said they had ever injected drugs, while 0.19 percent, or 440,000, reported having injected drugs within the past year.

People aged 35 to 49 were most likely to report having ever injected drugs, with 3.1 percent saying they had ever done so, while injection drug use was more common among men than women (2 percent vs 1 percent) and among whites than blacks (1.7 percent vs 0.8 percent).

While use of injection drugs was more common among blacks than whites for people born before 1955, the reverse was true for those born later.

Doctors should be sure to ask patients, regardless of their age, about past and present injection drug use, Armstrong advised, given the risk of the spread of blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HIV.

"Anyone who has ever used injection drugs, no matter how infrequently or how remotely in the past, should be appropriately counseled and offered testing for the human immunodeficiency virus, the hepatitis B virus, and HCV," he concludes.

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, January 22, 2007.