Up until now, research into the demographics of drug use has focused more on age, finding that midlife is the riskiest time for drug-related death, but Burke and colleagues saw that the year a person was born also has a large effect.
These phases map onto the previously identified drug waves that came with the waxing and waning popularity of prescription opioids, heroin and fentanyl, each in turn.
Peering within each generation, Jalal and colleagues saw a steady march toward greater overdose risk at younger ages for each successive birth year, which they found quite surprising.
Theres no reason why the lines should be fanning like this, Jalal said. If you look at breast cancer, for example, or any other mortality curves, they dont look like that.
Its not clear why this is happening, Jalal said, but the pattern is too clean to chalk up to chance. And an overall rise in drug overdose deathsalthough that is happening in the background of these datadoes not explain away the results presented in this study.
Burke uses an analogy borrowed from infectious diseases to explain the progressive shift of drug overdose deaths to younger ages.
Burke hopes that the highly regular patterns uncovered in this analysis will give policy makers a tool for testing whether their measures to curb drug overdose deaths are working over the long termany effective intervention should disrupt the pattern.
Additional authors on the study are Jeanine Buchanich, David Sinclair and Mark Roberts, all of Pitt Public Health. Funding was provided by theNational Center for Advancing Translational Sciencesand theRobert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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Drug Use is Transmitted from Old to Young - UPJ Athletics
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