Leveraging pooled medical examiner records to surveil complex and emerging patterns of polysubstance use in the United States.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The United States (US) is an extreme global outlier for drug-related death rates. However, data describing drug-related deaths are generally available only on an 8-13-month lag. Furthermore, granular details about substance-involvement are often not available, which particularly stymies efforts to track fatal polysubstance and novel psychoactive substance use. Detailed medical examiner records provide a powerful source of information for drug-related death surveillance, but have been underutilized.

Methods

We pooled medical examiner data from five US states and 14 counties that together comprise 18% of the US population to examine demographic, geographic, and drug-specific trends in polysubstance drug-related deaths. We employed mixed effects logistic regression t

SUBMITTER: Shover CL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12376971 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature