In a new study, researchers found that the generation a person was born into—Silent Generation, Baby Boomer, Generation X or Millennial—strongly predicts how likely they are to die from a drug overdose, and at what age.
The research was conducted by a team at the University of Pittsburgh.
Up until now, research into the demographics of drug use has focused more on age, finding that midlife is the riskiest time for drug-related death, but the team saw that the year a person was born also has a large effect.
IN the study, the team analyzed 661,565 drug overdose deaths reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1979 to 2017, plotting death rate as a function of both age and either birth year or generation.
The data clearly showed that the overdose epidemic emerged abruptly among the Baby Boomers, shifted youth-ward for Generation X, and then soared to new heights among the Millennials.
These phases map onto the previously identified drug waves that came with the waxing and waning popularity of prescription opioids, heroin, and fentanyl, each in turn.
Peering within each generation, the team saw a steady march toward greater overdose risk at younger ages for each successive birth year, which they found quite surprising.
It’s not clear why this is happening, but the pattern is too clean to chalk up to chance.
And an overall rise in drug overdose deaths—although that is happening in the background of these data—does not explain away the results presented in this study.
The team uses an analogy borrowed from infectious diseases to explain the progressive shift of drug overdose deaths to younger ages.
They hope that the highly regular patterns uncovered in this analysis will give policymakers a tool for testing whether their measures to curb drug overdose deaths are working over the long term—any effective intervention should disrupt the pattern.
One author of the study is Donald Burke, M.D., who holds the Jonas Salk Chair of Population Health and is dean emeritus of Pitt Public Health.
The study is published in Nature Medicine.
Copyright © 2020 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
