Measuring network dynamics of opioid overdose deaths in the United States.

ABSTRACT: The US opioid overdose epidemic has been a major public health concern in recent decades. There has been increasing recognition that its etiology is rooted in part in the social contexts that mediate substance use and access; however, reliable statistical measures of social influence are lacking in the literature. We use Facebook's social connectedness index (SCI) as a proxy for real-life social networks across diverse spatial regions that help quantify social connectivity across different spatial units. This is a measure of the relative probability of connections between localities that offers a unique lens to understand the effects of social networks on health outcomes. We use SCI to develop a variable, called "deaths in social proximity", to measure the influence of social networks on o

SUBMITTER: Tiwari K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11604951 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature