7/23/18 – 5:09 A.M.

The opioid epidemic isn’t only taking lives, it’s taking away the years people have to spend with friends and family. A new report from the Ohio Alliance for Innovation in Population Health illustrates this point. The study found that Hancock County lost nearly 2,000 years of life as a result of opioid deaths between 2010 and 2016. The report found Putnam County lost 483 years, Wood County lost more than 2,500 years, and Seneca County lost 1,400 years.

The study calculated years of life by subtracting the age of death of each person from the Social Security Administration’s information on standard life expectancy by gender. Because the populations for each county vary, the study also calculated the number of years lost per 100,000 people. Under that measurement, Hancock County lost more than 2,600 years of life. That’s compared to 1,400 in Putnam County and 2,400 in Seneca County.

Around the state, more than 13,000 Ohioans have died from overdoses in the same time span. That amounts to more than 519,000 years of life lost.

There’s more on this story in today’s edition of the Courier.

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