Tracking the spatial dynamics of the synthetic opioid crisis in the USA, 2013-2020 using human mobility-based graph neural network

Abstract

Synthetic opioids are the most common drugs involved in drug-involved overdose mortalities in the U.S. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2018, about 70% of all drug overdose deaths involved opioids and 67% of all opioid-involved deaths were accounted for by synthetic opioids. In this study, we investigated the spread of synthetic opioids between 2013 and 2020 in the U.S., and analyzed the relationship between the spatiotemporal pattern of synthetic opioid-involved deaths and another key opioid, heroin, and compared patterns of deaths involving these two types of drugs during this time period. Spatial connections between counties were incorporated into a graph convolutional neural network model to represent and analyze the spread of synthetic opioid-involved deaths, and in the context of heroin-involved deaths.