Take-home naloxone should be an additional standard of care for prevention of heroin overdose death
The study estimates that naloxone successfully reversed heroin overdose in 96 to 99% of cases. The study also found no empirical evidence that THN programs encourage heroin use. The evaluation of THN programs is challenging: randomized controlled trials are often considered the gold standard of scientific study, but conducting trials for THN would often be unethical and fraught with difficulties given the infrequency and unpredictability of overdose . To get around that problem, this study used the Bradford Hill criteria: a standard tool for assessing the impact of broad-based public health interventions where it is ethically not feasible or operationally impractical to conduct randomized controlled trials. The Bradford-Hill criteria were devised in 1965 by British epidemiologist and statistician Sir Austin Bradford Hill to assess causality when only correlational data are available. The application of the Bradford Hill criteria to the current evidence base from non-randomized ...