ArticleEpidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.)2018
Trends in Black and White Opioid Mortality in the United States, 1979-2015.
Article in Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 99 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
99 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- An Evaluation of Opioid Use in Black Communities: A Rapid Review of the Literature.Harvard review of psychiatryPooled it
- Laboratory-induced stress and craving predict opioid use during follow-up among individuals with prescription opioid use disorder.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2021Trial
- Racial/Ethnic and Regional Disparities in Opioid-Involved Overdose Deaths among Children and Adolescents in the United States.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- National trends in cardiovascular deaths with concurrent accidental drug poisoning coding in the United States: a 22-year analysis of the CDC WONDER database (1999-2020).BMC cardiovascular disorders · 2026Article
- Higher drug overdose mortality among non-hispanic black adults aged 55 and older in the U.S.: Analysis of national death records from CDC's WONDER database (1999-2023).Drug and alcohol dependence reports · 2026Article
- Trends in Chronic Ischemic Heart Disease-Related Mortality in Older Adults With Atrial Fibrillation (1999-2023): A CDC WONDER Database Analysis.Clinical cardiology · 2026Article
- Associations of community socioeconomic factors and opioid use disorder across an urban-to-rural spectrum in Pennsylvania: an electronic health record-based case-control study.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2025Article
- Mental and Behavioral Health Disparities Among Pain-Reliever Misusers: A Cross-Sectional Analysis by Race and Ethnicity.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Geography And Fentanyl: Explaining The Disproportionate Rise In Opioid Overdose Deaths Among Black Americans.Health affairs (Project Hope) · 2025Article
- Pre-COVID-19 Geographic Inequalities in Non-Hispanic Black US Life Expectancy, 1990 to 2019.Population and development review · 2025Article
- Widening Racial Disparities in the U.S. Overdose Epidemic.American journal of preventive medicine · 2025Article
- Trends and Disparities in Acute Myocardial Infarction-Related Mortality Among U.S. Adults With Hypertension, 2000-2023.Clinical cardiology · 2025Review
- Intersectional Racial and Sex Disparities in Unintentional Overdose Mortality.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Invited commentary: motivating better methods-and better data collection-for measuring the prevalence of drug misuse.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Racial and sex disparities in inpatient outcomes of patients with opioid overdose: a nationwide analysis.Proceedings (Baylor University. Medical Center) · 2025Article
- Racial/ethnic inequality in homelessness and drug overdose deaths in US States.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2025Article
- Understanding the demographics of the opioid overdose death crisis.Journal of population economics · 2025Article
- Associations of high-risk drug patterns with mortality among community-dwelling older adults: A 23-year prospective cohort study.PloS one · 2025Article
- Mortality following adolescent substance treatment: 21-year follow-up from a single clinical site.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2025Article
- The Role of Despair in Predicting Self-Destructive Behaviors.Population research and policy review · 2025Article
39 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundRecent research on the US opioid epidemic has focused on the white or total population and has largely been limited to data after 1999. However, understanding racial differences in long-term trends by opioid type may contribute to improving interventions.
methodsUsing multiple cause of death data, we calculated age-standardized opioid mortality rates, by race and opioid type, for the US resident population from 1979 to 2015. We analyzed trends in mortality rates using joinpoint regression.
resultsFrom 1979 to 2015, the long-term trends in opioid-related mortality for Earlier data did not include ethnicity so this is incorrect. It is all black and all white residents in the US. blacks and whites went through three successive waves. In the first wave, from 1979 to the mid-1990s, the epidemic affected both populations and was driven by heroin. In the second wave, from the mid-1990s to 2010, the increase in opioid mortality was driven by natural/semi-synthetic opioids (e.g., codeine, morphine, hydrocodone, or oxycodone) among whites, while there was no increase in mortality for blacks. In the current wave, increases in opioid mortality for both populations have been driven by heroin and synthetic opioids (e.g., fentanyl and its analogues). Heroin rates are currently increasing at 31% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 27, 35) per year for whites and 34% (95% CI = 30, 40) for blacks. Concurrently, respective synthetic opioids are increasing at 79% (95% CI = 50, 112) and 107% (95% CI = -15, 404) annually.
conclusionSince 1979, the nature of the opioid epidemic has shifted from heroin to prescription opioids for the white population to increasing of heroin/synthetic deaths for both black and white populations. See video abstract at, http://links.lww.com/EDE/B377.
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