More mothers are getting addicted to opioid while they are giving births in the United States. The number has increased about 400% between 1999 and 2014, according to the new study “Opioid Use Disorder Documented at Delivery Hospitalization - United States, 1999–2014” published last week by CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention).
To visualize the trend, I have downloaded the data from their website and visualized it as a series of charts.
Here is a chart that shows each year’s increased rate compared to 1999.
It is a well-known fact by now that the Opioid Epidemic here in the United States has been only getting worse. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death under 50, and two-thirds of those deaths from opioids, either they are prescription (legal) or non-prescription (illegal).
And nothing can give us more devastating feeling than realizing that the number of babies who are born addicted to Opioid is dramatically increasing in this country.
The United States is divided, but it is much more diverse than just two sides.
Take a look at this chart that shows the trend of the increase rate by State.
In this chart, the increased rates are calculated in comparison to 2000 because many states don’t have the data for 1999.
Some of the states like Vermont, Maine, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina are showing dramatic increases ranging from 4,000% to 10,000%! That’s 40x and 100x!
So what does this really mean?
Here is a chart that shows the trend of the number of the opioid addicted mothers during the pregnancy per 1,000 mothers.
The states like Vermont, Main, West Virginia are showing the dramatic increase here as well. In Vermont, almost 50 out of 1,000 or 5 out of 100 mothers are giving births while they are addicted to opioids.
To make it easier to compare among the states, here is a bar chart showing the increase rates of 2014 for the states.
Vermont is showing the huge increase compared to any other states, and that is 9,720% or 97 times more than 2000.
And here is the number of the Opioid Taking Mothers per 1000 Mothers.
In Vermont, 48.6 out of 1,000 or 1 out of 20 babies are born addicted to opioids.
We can show the epidemic on Map. Here is a Map that shows the numbers of the addicted mothers per 1,000 mothers in each state.
Just to make it clear though, these are only for the 30 states and a district of Columbia (Washington D.C.). This means, other 22 states don’t even disclose the numbers, and I don’t think their numbers are any better, if not worse.
The states that collect and provide the data to CDC.
Another alarming thing to me is that these increases are correlated to the state opioid prescribing rates in the general population, according to the study.
For example, the estimated prescribing rate is 138 opioid prescriptions per 100 persons in 2012. Yes, you heard it right. There are more prescriptions than the population! And these are not illegally obtained, they are prescribed by the doctors.
The study is done based on the data up till 2014, that’s 4 years ago. After seeing the dramatic increase especially in some states like Vermont, Maine, West Virginia, etc. I’m only guessing the situation is much worse today.
Just to make my point clear, this is not really about mothers. In fact, men are disproportionately more addicted than women.
The real problem is the opioid epidemic in this country. That is making the Americans’ average lifetime expectancy shorter. It is causing the drug overdose deaths to be the leading cause of death of Americans under 50.
And we are seeing just one aspect of the epidemic, and that is horrifying and upsetting.
About Data:
The data visualized in this post was obtained from the CDC page “Opioid Use Disorder Documented at Delivery Hospitalization — United States, 1999–2014”.
An excerpt about the data from the page:
Data were analyzed from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS; 1999–2014) and the State Inpatient Databases (SID; 1999–2014) of HCUP, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (4). NIS approximates a 20% stratified sample of all U.S. community hospital discharges participating in HCUP and is weighted to be nationally representative. Survey-specific analysis techniques were used to account for clustering, stratification, and weighting in NIS analyses (4). The SID contain state-specific data on hospital inpatient stays, regardless of payer; 30 states and DC had publically available data.
State data were available for 30 states and DC; however, availability by year ranged from 14 states in 1999 to 28 states in 2011
I have cleaned, transformed, and visualized the data in Exploratory. You can see how the data was acquired and transformed on this page, and also download it in CSV or EDF (Exploratory Data Format) format on the same page.
The data acquisition and transformation steps can be also expressed in a programming language R as follows.
exploratory::scrape_html_table("https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6731a1.htm", 1, "TRUE" ,encoding="Unicode (UTF-8)") %>%
exploratory::clean_data_frame() %>%
rename(Year0 = Year) %>%
select(-`Average annual rate change¶`) %>%
rename_all(funs(str_remove(., "Year"))) %>%
filter(State %nin% c("National", "State")) %>%
gather(key, value, `0`:`15`, na.rm = TRUE, convert = TRUE) %>%
mutate(key = key + 1999, value = parse_number(value)) %>%
rename(Year = key, numbers_per_K = value) %>%
arrange(`State`, `Year`) %>%
group_by(State) %>%
fill(numbers_per_K, .direction = "down") %>%
fill(numbers_per_K, .direction = "up") %>%
mutate(numbers_per_K_pct_diff_first = (numbers_per_K - first(numbers_per_K)) / first(numbers_per_K) * 100, numbers_per_K_pct_first = (numbers_per_K / first(numbers_per_K)) * 100, over_1_pct = numbers_per_K > 5) %>%
filter(Year > 1999)Citation:
Haight SC, Ko JY, Tong VT, Bohm MK, Callaghan WM. Opioid Use Disorder Documented at Delivery Hospitalization — United States, 1999–2014. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2018;67:845–849. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6731a1.