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. 2020 Dec;97(6):814-822.
doi: 10.1007/s11524-020-00436-8.

Geospatial Variations and Neighborhood Deprivation in Drug-Related Admissions and Overdoses

Julien Cobert  1 , Paul M Lantos  2   3 , Mark M Janko  3 , David G A Williams  4 , Karthik Raghunathan  5 , Vijay Krishnamoorthy  4 , Eric A JohnBull  5 , Atilio Barbeito  4   5 , Padma Gulur  4
Affiliations

Geospatial Variations and Neighborhood Deprivation in Drug-Related Admissions and Overdoses

Julien Cobert et al. J Urban Health. 2020 Dec.

Abstract

Drug overdoses are a national and global epidemic. However, while overdoses are inextricably linked to social, demographic, and geographical determinants, geospatial patterns of drug-related admissions and overdoses at the neighborhood level remain poorly studied. The objective of this paper is to investigate spatial distributions of patients admitted for drug-related admissions and overdoses from a large, urban, tertiary care center using electronic health record data. Additionally, these spatial distributions were adjusted for a validated socioeconomic index called the Area Deprivation Index (ADI). We showed spatial heterogeneity in patients admitted for opioid, amphetamine, and psychostimulant-related diagnoses and overdoses. While ADI was associated with drug-related admissions, it did not correct for spatial variations and could not account alone for this spatial heterogeneity.

Keywords: Area deprivation; Drug overdoses; Epidemiology; Opioid epidemic; Socioeconomics.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Scatterplot of drug-related admissions vs overdoses with point size and color mapping to the total number of patients
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Posterior fixed effects plot looking at ADI associated with drug-related admissions and overdoses. ADI is scaled such that 1 represents a 20 percentile change in ADI. Note that the distributions do not cover 0 and thus would be extremely improbable that there is no effect of ADI on admissions for drug-related issues or overdoses
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Bayesian spatial regression of drug-related admissions adjusted for ADI—color scale represents the rate ratio based on number of Duke patients per census block group
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Bayesian spatial regression of drug-related overdoses adjusted for ADI—color scale represents the rate ratio based on number of Duke patients per census block group
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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