Modeling and forecasting age-specific drug overdose mortality in the United States

Abstract

Drug overdose deaths continue to increase in the United States for all major drug categories. Over the past two decades the total number of overdose fatalities has increased more than fivefold; since 2013 the surge in overdose rates is primarily driven by fentanyl and methamphetamines. Different drug categories and factors such as age, gender, and ethnicity are associated with different overdose mortality characteristics that may also change in time. For example, the average age at death from a drug overdose has decreased from 1940 to 1990 while the overall mortality rate has steadily increased. To provide insight into the population-level dynamics of drug overdose mortality, we develop an age-structured model for drug addiction. Using an augmented ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), we show through a simple example how our model can be combined with synthetic observation data to estimate mortality rate and an age-distribution parameter. Finally, we use an EnKF to combine our model with observation data on overdose fatalities in the United States from 1999 to 2020 to forecast the evolution of overdose trends and estimate model parameters.

Forecasting drug overdose mortality by age in the United States at the national and county levels

“…To combine the age-structured drug overdose model (1) with corresponding observational data, we use an ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) [58] as implemented in [33,83]. Figure 7 shows a schematic of the main EnKF steps.…”

“…In this paper we advance the state-of-the-art in drug overdose forecasting by combining a mechanistic model describing age-stratified drug-overdose fatalities with recorded mortalities using data assimilation techniques [31–33]. The latter were first developed within the geological and atmospheric sciences to merge high-dimensional dynamical systems with large datasets to produce weather and climate forecasts.…”

Recent advances in collective phenomena

“…Schütz unveils a new duality between the ASEP model and biased random walks. Lattice models are not of purely academic interest, as demonstrated by the fifth paper, "Modeling and forecasting age-specific overdose mortality in the United States" by Böttcher et al [10]. The authors introduced a new model of overdose mortality and tuned its parameters with observation data from the USA.…”