Retrospective Analysis of Oxycodone- and Cocaine-Related Deaths in Southwestern Ontario during 2003–2010
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Oxycodone hydrochloride is a potent semisynthetic opioid analgesic with a primary role in moderate to severe chronic pain management. It was approved by Health Canada in 1996 for that purpose and added to the Ontario provincial drug formulary in 2000. Increases in oxycodone abuse and oxycodone-related deaths have been noted in both Canada and the USA since oxycodone's introduction to the pharmaceutical market. A retrospective analysis was conducted, reviewing all of the medicolegal autopsies performed at a regional Ontario Forensic Pathology Unit, from 2003–2010. All cases that listed oxycodone and/or cocaine as cause of death were reviewed to ascertain trends in demographic data, preexisting prescription medication use, and concomitant drug use. Cocaine-related deaths were analyzed in order to contextualize oxycodone-related deaths in the setting of drug abuse. Oxycodone-related deaths were observed to increase from 2003–2010 and surpassed cocaine-related deaths in 2010. The proportion of female to male oxycodone-related deaths did not statistically differ during the study years. The proportion of female deaths was constant over the study period, however, male deaths showed a statistically significant increase by 23% from 2009–2010. Females were more likely to die from oxycodone rather than cocaine use, and the converse was seen in males. Among all oxycodone-related deaths over half of the decedents (53%) had a prescription for oxycodone. Oxycodone was also more likely to be reported with polysubstance use. This study illustrates how an abused prescription analgesic can be an ever-increasing burden on society even ten years after its release onto the market.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".