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. We design the factor model to yield meaningful interactions among predefined subsets of these outcomes, causing a departure from the conventional lower triangular structure in the loadings matrix and leading to familiar identifiability issues. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that involves decomposing the loadings matrix within a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, allowing us to estimate the loadings and factors uniquely. As a result, we gain a better understanding of the spatio-temporal dynamics of the opioid epidemic in North Carolina.