Heat exposure and drug overdose mortality in the USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Understanding the relationship between heat and drug overdose mortality is critical given the ongoing overdose crisis and rising global temperatures driven by climate change. Evidence from local jurisdictions in the United States (US) and Canada indicates that exposure to heat is associated with increased drug overdose fatalities, but the widespread impact of heat on national drug overdose deaths is undetermined. We aimed to determine the effect of heat exposure on drug overdose mortality in the US. DESIGN: An observational study using monthly, county-level data from 1999 to 2020 and a fixed effect model estimated with linear regression. The model accounts for time-invariant county-month factors and state-level time-specific shocks. SETTING: All counties in the continental US during the months of June to September from 1999 to 2020. PARTICIPANTS: Decedents in the National Center for Health Statistics restricted Vital Statistics mortality data with a cause of death of a drug overdose, aggregated to county-level mortality rates. MEASUREMENTS: All drug overdose mortality rate per 100 000 population. The monthly average maximum heat index (measured in degrees Celsius) was collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network. FINDINGS: A one-degree Celsius increase in the heat index was associated with an increase in all drug overdose mortality by 0.0098 deaths per 100 000 population [95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.0057-0.014, P < 0.001], with significant effects for deaths related to opioids (0.0060 deaths, 95% CI = 0.0026-0.0095, P < 0.001), cocaine (0.0028 deaths, 95% CI = 0.0012-0.0045, P < 0.001) and psychostimulants (0.0028 deaths, 95% CI = 0.0015-0.0041, P < 0.001). In further analyses, larger impacts were observed after 2013, in counties with greater levels of social vulnerability and in suburban and urban counties. Estimates suggest that approximately 150 excess drug overdose deaths occurred per year during the hottest periods due to heat exposure. CONCLUSIONS: Exposure to heat appears to be associated with increases in drug overdose deaths in the United States in recent decades.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".