# A Knowledge Graph-based Approach for Exploring the U.S. Opioid Epidemic

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11513 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11513/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [eDarkTrends: Harnessing Social Media Trends in Substance use disorders for Opioid Listings on Cryptomarket](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15764/) (2021)
- ["Can We Detect Substance Use Disorder?": Knowledge and Time Aware Classification on Social Media from Darkweb](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10512/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The United States is in the midst of an opioid epidemic with recent estimates indicating that more than 130 people die every day due to drug overdose. The over-prescription and addiction to opioid painkillers, heroin, and synthetic opioids, has led to a public health crisis and created a huge social and economic burden. Statistical learning methods that use data from multiple clinical centers across the US to detect opioid over-prescribing trends and predict possible opioid misuse are required. However, the semantic heterogeneity in the representation of clinical data across different centers makes the development and evaluation of such methods difficult and non-trivial. We create the Opioid Drug Knowledge Graph (ODKG) -- a network of opioid-related drugs, active ingredients, formulations, combinations, and brand names. We use the ODKG to normalize drug strings in a clinical data warehouse consisting of patient data from over 400 healthcare facilities in 42 different states. We showcase the use of ODKG to generate summary statistics of opioid prescription trends across US regions. These methods and resources can aid the development of advanced and scalable models to monitor the opioid epidemic and to detect illicit opioid misuse behavior. Our work is relevant to policymakers and pain researchers who wish to systematically assess factors that contribute to opioid over-prescribing and iatrogenic opioid addiction in the US.