Understanding the opioid syndemic in North Carolina: A novel approach to modeling and identifying factors.

The opioid epidemic is a significant public health challenge in North Carolina, but limited data restrict our understanding of its complexity. Examining trends and relationships among different outcomes believed to reflect opioid misuse provides an alternative perspective to understand the opioid epidemic. We use a Bayesian dynamic spatial factor model to capture the interrelated dynamics within six different county-level outcomes, such as illicit opioid overdose deaths, emergency department visits related to drug overdose, treatment counts for opioid use disorder, patients receiving prescriptions for buprenorphine, and newly diagnosed cases of acute and chronic hepatitis C virus and human immunodeficiency virus.

Estimating prevalence of opioid misuse in North Carolina counties from 2016-2021: An integrated abundance model approach.

Background: The overdose epidemic remains largely driven by opioids, but county-level prevalence of opioid misuse is unknown. Without this information, public health and policy responses are limited by a lack of knowledge on the scope of the problem.

Methods: Using an integrated abundance model, we estimate annual county-level prevalence of opioid misuse for counties in North Carolina from 2016 to 2021.

Economic Impact of the Apoyo con Cariño Intervention: Improving Palliative Care for Hispanics with Serious Illness.

Specialty palliative care has been associated with cost savings at the end of life, while patient navigators have been independently associated with cost savings due to screening and treatment early in the course of disease. Evidence is limited regarding patient navigators and cost savings at the end of life. To determine the cost-effectiveness of a lay patient navigator intervention in improving palliative care outcomes for Hispanic persons with serious noncancer illness.

Rates of receiving medication for opioid use disorder and opioid overdose deaths during the early synthetic opioid crisis: a county-level analysis.

Background: Medications for opioid use disorder are associated with lower risk of drug overdoses at the individual level. However, little is known about whether these effects translate to population-level reductions. We investigated whether county-level efforts to increase access to medication for opioid use disorder in 2012-2014 were associated with opioid overdose deaths in New York State during the first years of the synthetic opioid crisis.

Human placental stem cell-based therapies for prevention of abdominal adhesions: A prospective randomized preclinical trial.

Background: Abdominal adhesions are networks of fibrotic tissues that form between organs postoperatively. Current prophylactic strategies do not reproducibly prevent adhesive small bowel obstruction across the entire abdomen. Human placental-derived stem cells produce an anti-inflammatory secretome that has been applied to multiple fibrosing diseases.