Opioid Overdose Deaths Among Over-55 Population Soar, Particularly Among Black Men

Opioid overdose-involved deaths among Americans over the age of 55 have increased 10-fold since 1999, and older Black men in particular have been disproportionately impacted, according to a study published on Tuesday by JAMA Network Open.

Research led by Maryann Mason, PhD, an associate professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, found that from 1999 to 2019, 79,893 individuals over the age of 55 died due to opioid overdose. The annual rate of overdose deaths among the 55-and-over population during the period studied increased from 0.9 per 100,000 in 1999 to 10.7 in 2019, with increases annually starting in 2000.

Overdose death rates among Black men in particular began to disproportionately surge starting in 2013. By 2019, the rate reached 40.03 per 100,000—4 times greater than the rate for older US adults overall. Mason and her colleagues called the discrepancy concerning and said that it may signal future increases in the opioid overdose death rate for the over-55 population in general, as the proportion of older adults who are Black is growing rapidly vs. non-Hispanic White men.

“It is notable that the beginning of the increase in opioid overdose deaths among older non-Hispanic Black men coincides with what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified as the third wave in the opioid epidemic characterized by the increased presence of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid in the drug supply,” the researchers wrote in their findings. “However, it is unclear why other older adult subgroups did not experience concomitant increases in opioid overdose rates.”

Differences in characteristics in the drug supplies accessed by different subgroups, as well as whether contributing substances were illicit or prescription were posited as potential factors for the discrepancy, but the researchers said further investigation was needed.

Among the study’s other findings:

• From 1999 to 2019, 79.97% of the individuals studied who died due to opioid overdose were between the ages of 55 and 64 years old.
• Men comprised 58.98% of those who died.
• The largest single-year increase in overall opioid-involved deaths occurred from 2015 to 2016.
• Overdose death rates for Hispanic or Latino men and non-Hispanic White men and women mirrored the overall rate of overdose deaths for the over-55 population until 2016, at which point the rates for non-Hispanic White women rained stable at lower than the overall rate through 2019.