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Immediate access to opioid agonist treatment (OAT) for patients presenting with opioid use disorder may provide greater health benefits at less cost than observed standard of care, according to a study published online Nov. 21 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Emanuel Krebs, from St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues sought to determine the cost-effectiveness of OAT versus observed standard of care for patients presenting with opioid use disorder. Population-level administrative databases capturing treatment and criminal justice records for California were linked (2006 to 2010). Immediate access to OAT for all treatment recipients was found by the researchers to cost less (by $78,257), with patients accumulating more quality-adjusted life-years (by 0.42) versus the observed standard of care. Imagining a hypothetical scenario where all Californians starting treatment of opioid use disorder in 2014 had immediate access to OAT, the team found that total lifetime savings for this cohort could be as high as $3.8 billion.

Liraglutide treatment for weight management is not associated with increased risk of cardiovascular events, according to a study published online Sept. 26 in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. Melanie J. Davies, M.D., from the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust in the United Kingdom, and colleagues conducted post hoc analysis using data from 5,908 participants in five randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials of liraglutide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist approved for weight management, in order to assess cardiovascular risk. The researchers found that with liraglutide (3.0 mg), eight participants had positively adjudicated cardiovascular events (1.54 events/1,000 person-years), compared to 10 participants in the comparators group (3.65 events/1000 person-years). Compared to the non-liraglutide group, the hazard ratio for 3.0 mg liraglutide treatment was 0.42 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.17 to 1.08).