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Observational Study
. 2019 Dec;34(12):2702-2704.
doi: 10.1007/s11606-019-05255-5.

Increases in Online Posts About Synthetic Opioids Preceding Increases in Synthetic Opioid Death Rates: a Retrospective Observational Study

Daniel A Bowen  1 , Julie O'Donnell  2 , Steven A Sumner  3
Affiliations
Observational Study

Increases in Online Posts About Synthetic Opioids Preceding Increases in Synthetic Opioid Death Rates: a Retrospective Observational Study

Daniel A Bowen et al. J Gen Intern Med. 2019 Dec.
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they do not have a conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Rate of posts discussing synthetic opioids on substance message boards and unintentional synthetic opioid overdose deaths, 2010–2016. Note: The rate of unintentional overdose fatalities resulting from synthetic opioids (a category that includes fentanyl and fentanyl analogs but excludes methadone) was ascertained from death certificate data processed through the National Vital Statistics System (underlying cause of death code X40-X44 and a multiple cause of death code of T40.4). Terms used to identify synthetic opioid posts were assembled from the top 40 words identified by the word2vec and fastText algorithms as most semantically similar to “fentanyl” as measured by cosine similarity; lists of the top 20 terms produced by each algorithm were reviewed by an expert and combined to include 34 unique terms: fent, butryfentanyl, fentanils, carfentanil, fentanyls, fentnyl, fetanyl, furanylfentanyl, fentantyl, fentynal, butyryl, lofentanyl, carfentanyl, sufentanil, truckfentanyl, butyrfentanyl, fentanyli, fentynyl, carfent, ocfentanyl, fentayl, furanyl, fentany, fentanyl, acrylfentanyl, carafentanyl, fentynl, sufentanyl, butyr, fentanylso, acetylfentanyl, busfentanyl, fentanayl, fentanil.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Rate of posts discussing fentanyl analogs on substance message boards, 2010–2017. Note: The fentanyl analogs examined were those identified from the list of terms used in Figure1. The word2vec and fastText algorithms were then run for each of the analogs to identify any spelling variants that existed. Terms used to identify the various fentanyl analogs underwent expert review and included carfentanil, carfentanyl, carfentanils carfent, csrfentanil, carefentanil, carfentnyl, carfentail, carfentenil, carfentenyl, carfentinil, carfentynal, carf; butyrfentanyl, butyrfent, butyrylfentanyl, butyr, butyryl, butryfentanyl; furanylfentanyl, furanylfent, furanyl, fuf; acrylfentanyl, acryloylfentanyl, acrylfent, acryl; sufentanyl, sufentanyl, sufenta; lofentanil, lofentanyl, lofent, ocfentanyl, ocfentanil, acetylfentanyl, acetylfent.
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