According to newly published research, opioid testing information was unavailable in half of injury death investigations in the U.S. in 2021 and in only about one out of ten unintentional overdose death investigations that were conducted that year.
This at a time when the autopsy rate, that is, the percentage of deaths for which a medical examination is performed, is at all-time lows.
According to a 2023 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), from 2003 through 2020, the autopsy rate in the U.S. has hovered between a high of 8.7 percent, in 2006 and 2007, and a low of 7.4 percent in 2020.
Percentages of course are really only meaningful if you have the underlying numbers, so in 2020, according to the CDC, there were 3,383,729 deaths in the U.S., of which 249,337 were autopsied. That’s an average of about 683 autopsies per day.
In 2007, when the autopsy rate hit 8.7 percent, according to the CDC there were a total of 2,298,608 deaths in the us, of which 199,154 were autopsied. That’s an average of about 546 per day.
To learn more, KBOO’s Doug McVay spoke recently with Dr. Alexander Lundberg, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg school of medicine and the lead author of a research letter published February 19 in the journal JAMA entitled “Percentage of opioid tests available in U.S. injury death investigations, 2021.”
- KBOO