Mental disorders among postpartum individuals with medically high-risk infants and/or obstetrical complications: A population requiring further attention.

Adolescents have not been spared in the US overdose crisis. In 2023, 708 adolescents lost their lives from drug overdose, with 79 % of deaths involving opioids and 97 % of opioid involved deaths involving fentanyl (Panchal et al., 2025). The proliferation of fentanyl in the illicit drug supply in pressed counterfeit pills resembling prescription opioids may account for the rise in fatalities as adolescents are more likely to use this pill form, potentially unaware that they are using fentanyl (; ). Consequently, ensuring access to evidence-based treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) for adolescents is an urgent public health priority (). Medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) is the standard of care for treating OUD in adolescents (; ). However, previous national studies have found adolescents have experienced severely limited access to MOUD (; ). This study examines first episodes of treatment for OUD conducted at specialty substance use treatment programs across the US from 2017 to 2022. Our objective was to examine the proportion of adolescent treatment episodes for OUD with planned MOUD use compared to adults over time. This study utilized the most recent data available to build upon a 2013 analysis which found only 2.4 % of adolescents entering specialty treatment for heroin had planned MOUD use as compared to 26.3 % of adults and only 0.4 % of adolescents in specialty treatment for prescription opioids had planned MOUD use as compared to 12.0 % of adults (). Given the increased volatility of the illicit drug market in recent years, we sought to understand if the odds of all planned MOUD use in specialty treatment for OUD has changed over time for adolescents and adults. This study used national cross-sectional data from the Treatment Episode Data Set – Admissions (TEDS-A) collected by the Substance Use and Mental Health Services Administration across 2017 to 2022. TEDS is a data repository collected annually by all states receiving public funding for the purpose of monitoring public and private substance use treatment systems. The unit of analysis is treatment admission episodes to either state-licensed or certified substance use treatment facilities. This study was exempt from the human subjects’ ethical research requirements as it involved secondary analysis of deidentified public-use data. We followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guidelines for cross-sectional studies ().