After years of hearing about the danger of abuse, Iowa health-care practitioners are starting to trim prescriptions of opioid painkillers and other addictive pills, a top state regulator told legislators Monday.

The number of such prescription pills sold in Iowa this year is on track to hit about 270 million, Andrew Funk, executive director of the Iowa Board of Pharmacy, told a new legislative committee on opioid abuse. That’s still about 90 pills for each man, woman and child in Iowa, but it represents a 10 percent drop from the 301 million such pills sold in Iowa last year. The tentative 2017 estimate represents the first significant decline Funk's agency has seen in the numbers, despite widespread talk about the need to be more careful about use of addictive pills, including painkillers and sedatives.

The figures come from the state’s Prescription Drug Monitoring system, which automatically tracks all sales of addictive prescription medications from pharmacies.

Legislators on the committee said the new statistics offered a glimmer of hope amid a national epidemic of abuse of addictive narcotics, including prescription painkilling pills and illicit drugs such as heroin.

Rep. David Heaton, a Mount Pleasant Republican who co-chairs the committee, said it's too soon to tell how much to make of the slight decrease in prescriptions of addictive pills. “People are still dying,” he noted.

Although the epidemic here is not yet as severe as in many other states, about 200 Iowans died last year of overdoses related to opioids, including prescription pills and heroin, state experts say.

Experts across the nation have been urging doctors, nurse practitioners and dentists to be more careful in prescribing painkilling pills, which can be quickly addictive. Experts want health-care professionals to first consider other methods of pain control; limit the number of pills they include in each prescription order; and watch for signs that patients might be becoming addicted to their medications.

An addiction-treatment expert said he was glad to see a decline in the number of addictive pills being prescribed in Iowa. After years of reading stories about the danger and about professional consequences for loose prescribing, “people are starting to believe it,” said Mike Polich, chief executive officer of UCS Healthcare in Des Moines.

Polich, who testified at the hearing about the need for improved addiction treatment, spoke in an interview afterward about the decline of painkiller prescriptions reported by the pharmacy board. Although the drop is a good trend overall, he said, it could have a serious downside. “If people can’t get prescriptions for their pain, they may turn to street drugs,” including heroin, he said.

Iowa’s prescription-drug monitoring system was launched in 2009, to give health-care practitioners a way to check to see if patients seeking pain pills have received similar prescriptions from other clinics.

Unlike in some other states, health-care providers in Iowa are not required to check the electronic registry before prescribing addictive medication. Among all health-care providers who have authority to prescribe such medications, just 45 percent have registered with the system, Funk told legislators.

Phil McCollum, associate director of the Iowa Dental Board, told legislators just 23 percent of Iowa dentists have registered to use the registry, and just 4 percent have requested information from the system.

Legislators have declined in the past to require health-care providers to check the registry before prescribing addictive medication. Funk told them Monday that he hopes more doctors, dentists and nurse practitioners will voluntarily check it once his agency makes improvements in the computer system that should make it easier to use. Those improvements, which are to launch next spring, are being made with $400,000 in grant money via the Iowa Department of Public Health.

Funk used a video-game analogy to describe the current system’s “antiquated” software. “We are operating with an Atari, when there are PlayStation 4s available,” he joked.