Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Social Vulnerability And The Prevalence Of Opioid Use Disorder Among Older Medicare Beneficiaries In U.S. Counties, Tse-Chuan Yang, Seulki Kim, Stephen A. Matthews, Carla Shoff

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Objectives: Recent research has investigated the factors associated with the prevalence of opioid use disorder (OUD) among older adults (65+), which has rapidly increased in the past decade. However, little is known about the relationship between social vulnerability and the prevalence of OUD, and even less about whether the correlates of the prevalence of OUD vary across the social vulnerability spectrum. This study aims to fill these gaps. Methods: We assemble a county-level data set in the contiguous United States (U.S.) by merging 2021 Medicare claims with the CDC’s social vulnerability index and other covariates. Using the total number of …