Journal: NPJ digital medicine
Article Title: Monitoring the opioid epidemic via social media discussions.
doi: 10.1038/s41746-025-01642-x
Figure Lengend Snippet: Fig. 1 | Growth of opioid discussions amongst all users on Reddit. a The discussion about opioids on Reddit over time for the top 10 most discussed opioids. Fentanyl has become the most frequently mentioned non-heroin opioid in recent months. b Comment counts for opioids categorized by mu- opioid receptor activity. Mentions of full agonist opioids, those with the highest pain relief and non- medical use potential, have been on the rise since 2010 at a rate similar to heroin mentions and fully surpassing heroin mentions by mid-2017. This change in rates is not identifiable from analyzing the individual opioids.
Article Snippet: The combined near real-time Reddit synthetic opioid ARIMA model had significantly better accuracy in predicting overdose death rates at the national level compared to the lagged CDC-only model, suggesting Reddit data provides incremental predictive validity.
Techniques: Activity Assay