ArticleAddiction (Abingdon, England)2020
Estimating the prevalence of problem drug use from drug-related mortality data.
Article in Addiction (Abingdon, England), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Evidence-based framework for identifying opioid use disorder in administrative data: A systematic review and methodological development study.Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.) · 2026Pooled it
- Cohort Profile: Scotland's Substance Use and Health Intelligence Linked Dataset (SHIeLD).International journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Estimating community-level prevalence of opioid use disorder: Extrapolating from Medicaid claims data and other publicly available data sources in Ohio, USA.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2026Article
- The Socioeconomic Impact of Long-Acting Injectable Buprenorphine.ClinicoEconomics and outcomes research : CEOR · 2026Article
- Diagnosis and coding of opioid misuse: a systematic scoping review and implementation framework.Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Changing age profile and incidence of injecting drug use initiation among people in Australia who inject drugs: evidence from two national repeated cross-sectional studies.The Lancet regional health. Western Pacific · 2025Article
- Exercise, addiction and motivation: the development of a motivation scale in extreme sports as a sport of challenge with nature.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- On the estimation of population size-A comparison of capture-recapture and multiplier-benchmark methods.Statistical methods in medical research · 2024Article
- Providers' knowledge and perception of xylazine in the unregulated drug supply: a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study.Harm reduction journal · 2024Article
- Estimation of the prevalence of opioid misuse in New York State counties, 2007-2018: a bayesian spatiotemporal abundance model approach.American journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- The prevalence of opioid use disorder in Kentucky's counties: A two-year multi-sample capture-recapture analysis.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2023Article
- Characterizing Help-Seeking Searches for Substance Use Treatment From Google Trends and Assessing Their Use for Infoveillance: Longitudinal Descriptive and Validation Statistical Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- Opioid Use Disorder Among Ohio's Medicaid Population: Prevalence Estimates From 19 Counties Using a Multiplier Method.American journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Association of Bupropion, Naltrexone, and Opioid Agonist Treatment With Stimulant-Related Admissions Among People With Opioid Use Disorder: A Case-Crossover Analysis.The Journal of clinical psychiatry · 2022Article
- What is the prevalence of and trend in opioid use disorder in the United States from 2010 to 2019? Using multiplier approaches to estimate prevalence for an unknown population size.Drug and alcohol dependence reports · 2022Article
- Addressing delayed case reporting in infectious disease forecast modeling.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Modeling the population-level impact of opioid agonist treatment on mortality among people accessing treatment between 2001 and 2020 in New South Wales, Australia.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2022Article
- Invited Commentary: Drug Checking for Novel Insights Into the Unregulated Drug Supply.American journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Estimating the number of livebirths to Hepatitis C seropositive women in England in 2013 and 2018 using Bayesian modelling.PloS one · 2022Article
- Using Economic Evaluation to Inform Responses to the Opioid Epidemic in the United States: Challenges and Suggestions for Future Research.Substance use & misuse · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
aimsIndirect estimation methods are required for estimating the size of populations where only a proportion of individuals are observed directly, such as problem drug users (PDUs). Capture-recapture and multiplier methods are widely used, but have been criticized as subject to bias. We propose a new approach to estimating prevalence of PDU from numbers of fatal drug-related poisonings (fDRPs) using linked databases, addressing the key limitations of simplistic 'mortality multipliers'.
methodsOur approach requires linkage of data on a large cohort of known PDUs to mortality registers and summary information concerning additional fDRPs observed outside this cohort. We model fDRP rates among the cohort and assume that rates in unobserved PDUs are equal to rates in the cohort during periods out of treatment. Prevalence is estimated in a Bayesian statistical framework, in which we simultaneously fit regression models to fDRP rates and prevalence, allowing both to vary by demographic factors and the former also by treatment status.
resultsWe report a case study analysis, estimating the prevalence of opioid dependence in England in 2008/09, by gender, age group and geographical region. Overall prevalence was estimated as 0.82% (95% credible interval = 0.74-0.94%) of 15-64-year-olds, which is similar to a published estimate based on capture-recapture analysis.
conclusionsOur modelling approach estimates prevalence from drug-related mortality data, while addressing the main limitations of simplistic multipliers. This offers an alternative approach for the common situation where available data sources do not meet the strong assumptions required for valid capture-recapture estimation. In a case study analysis, prevalence estimates based on our approach were surprisingly similar to existing capture-recapture estimates but, we argue, are based on a much more objective and justifiable modelling approach.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.