What question did this study set out to answer?

To determine whether aggregated urine drug test data can accurately estimate national fatal drug overdoses during the standard 6-month surveillance reporting lag.

June 9, 2025JAMA Network OpenOpen Access

Generating Timely Estimates of Overdose Deaths for the US Using Urine Drug Test Data

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Authors

JMJ. MyersThe Ohio State University CMCharles MarksMillennium Engineering and Integration (United States)JKJ.H. KimThe Ohio State University

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Implication

Cross-sectional study demonstrates improved forecasting of US overdose deaths using urine drug test data, indicating that clinical testing can bridge surveillance reporting delays.

Key Points

To determine whether aggregated urine drug test data can accurately estimate national fatal drug overdoses during the standard 6-month surveillance reporting lag.
Cross-sectional study analyzing 3,135,748 urine specimens from patients aged 18 years or older across US substance use disorder treatment facilities from January 1, 2015, to January 31, 2025.
Aggregated monthly positivity rates and mean creatinine-normalized concentrations of fentanyl and methamphetamine, then trained negative binomial generalized linear models on 4-year rolling windows to project overdose mortality.
Across 537,104 recorded US overdose deaths between 2019 and August 2024, the urine drug test model achieved a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 7.1%, mean absolute error (MAE) of 540.9 deaths per month, and root mean squared error (RMSE) of 659.4.
The urine drug test approach outperformed the baseline autoregressive integrated moving average model (MAPE, 9.0%; MAE, 704.9 deaths per month; RMSE, 1075.8) and successfully identified the surge in overdose deaths at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cite This Study

Myers et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a71657d6c240de38cdc206e https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.14402

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Implication

Cross-sectional study demonstrates improved forecasting of US overdose deaths using urine drug test data, indicating that clinical testing can bridge surveillance reporting delays.

Generating Timely Estimates of Overdose Deaths for the US Using Urine Drug Test Data

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

Generating Timely Estimates of Overdose Deaths for the US Using Urine Drug Test Data

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

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