Previously submitted to: Online Journal of Public Health Informatics (no longer under consideration since Mar 11, 2024)
Date Submitted: Jul 14, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 14, 2023 - Sep 8, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Identifying Shared Opioid Supplies from Public Data on Opioid Deaths
ABSTRACT
Opioid-related, accidental death counts have increased in North America over the past decade, leading to the notion of an ‘opioid crisis’. In recent years, the majority of deaths involving opioids were due to illicit fentanyl, connecting deaths more strongly with illicit activities. This study presents a straightforward approach to determine if two locations shared the same opioid supply during a specific period of time. It is based on the assumption that synchronized death counts in two locations over a specific period of time highlight locations that shared opioid supplies. Data on accidental opioid deaths is publicly available in many health jurisdictions. The proposed analysis operates on data from pairs of locations of interest and involves calculating the Pearson correlation coefficients and the related p-values to check for statistical significance. Statistically significant coefficients higher than 0.5 identify locations as sharing access to the same opioid supply. As an example, data from the “Alberta substance use surveillance system” for the time from January 2019 until June 2022 is analyzed to identify connected opioid supplies in seven cities in Alberta, Canada. The limitations of this approach are discussed. This study describes how to provide information about shared supplies of illicit opioids to support health and social service providers, municipal administrators, or law enforcement agencies to respond to the public health concerns related to the opioid crisis.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.