NEW YORK, May 14 (Xinhua) -- There were 30,000 fewer U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2024 than the year before, the largest one-year decline ever recorded -- an estimated 80,000 people died from overdoses last year, according to provisional data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

That went down 27 percent from the 110,000 in 2023.

The CDC has been collecting comparable data for 45 years. The previous largest one-year drop was 4 percent in 2018, according to the agency's National Center for Health Statistics.

All but two states saw declines last year, with Nevada and South Dakota seeing small increases. Some of the biggest drops were in Ohio, West Virginia and other states that have been hard-hit in the nation's decades-long overdose epidemic.

Experts say more research needs to be done to understand what drove the reduction, but they mention several possible factors. Among the most cited: increased availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, expanded addiction treatment, shifts in how people use drugs, the growing impact of billions of dollars in opioid lawsuit settlement money.

Meanwhile, the number of at-risk Americans is shrinking, after waves of deaths in older adults and a shift in teens and younger adults away from the drugs that cause most deaths.