The headline numbers are stark. In 1999, the age-adjusted mortality rate for substance use disorders stood at 23.4 deaths per 100,000 population. By 2021, that figure had peaked at 147.9 per 100,000, a more than sixfold increase in just over two decades. The years since have brought a measure of relief, with the rate falling to 125.4 per 100,000 in 2024. Age adjustment is a critical statistical technique here: because populations age over time, raw death counts can be misleading. By standardizing to a reference age distribution, epidemiologists can compare mortality across years and demographic groups on equal footing, ensuring that the trends reflect genuine changes in risk rather than shifts in the age structure of the population itself.

To dissect these trends with precision, the research team employed joinpoint regression, a method designed to detect inflection points in mortality time series. Rather than fitting a single straight line to twenty-six years of data, joinpoint analysis identifies the years at which the trajectory changes direction and calculates the annual percent change for each segment. This approach allows investigators to pinpoint exactly when the crisis worsened, when interventions may have taken effect, and whether the recent decline represents a durable turning point or a temporary reprieve. The technique has become a mainstay of cancer and overdose surveillance precisely because it converts noisy annual figures into interpretable phases of acceleration and deceleration.

The demographic breakdown exposes profound inequities. Men died at more than twice the rate of women, with an age-adjusted mortality rate of 138.5 per 100,000 compared with 67.4 for women, a gap that reflects both higher rates of substance use and greater exposure to high-risk patterns such as fentanyl-contaminated opioid supplies. Among racial and ethnic groups, American Indian or Alaska Native populations bore the heaviest burden at 114.4 per 100,000, followed by White individuals at 104.3 and Black or African American individuals at 94.4. Hispanic populations recorded the lowest rate at 45.3 per 100,000, a figure that researchers often attribute in part to the so-called Hispanic paradox, though the authors caution that such aggregate comparisons can mask heterogeneity within groups and differences in death certificate classification practices.

Age patterns add another layer of complexity to the crisis. Adults aged 85 and older showed the highest mortality burden of any group, at 588.2 per 100,000, a figure that underscores how substance use disorders, particularly alcohol-related disease, accumulate lethal consequences over decades of exposure. While much public attention has focused on young and middle-aged adults felled by opioid overdoses, the data reveal that the cumulative toll of chronic substance use among the oldest Americans is staggering. This finding challenges the perception of substance use disorder as exclusively a disease of the young and highlights the need for screening, treatment, and harm-reduction services that extend into geriatric care settings, where substance problems are frequently overlooked or misattributed to aging itself.

Geography proved equally consequential. The Midwest recorded the highest regional mortality rate at 123.8 per 100,000, followed by the South at 98.2, the Northeast at 97.5, and the West at 79.2. At the state level, the spread was even more dramatic, ranging from 41.4 per 100,000 in Alabama to 194.4 per 100,000 in Vermont, a nearly fivefold difference that reflects divergent drug supply patterns, prescribing cultures, treatment access, and policy environments. The prominence of New England states at the top of the distribution aligns with the region’s early and intense exposure to synthetic opioids, while the lower rates in parts of the Deep South may partly reflect differences in death investigation and coding practices as well as genuinely different epidemiology.

Perhaps the most consistent geographic signal in the entire analysis was the urban-rural divide. Nonmetropolitan areas experienced an age-adjusted mortality rate of 121.1 per 100,000, substantially higher than the 91.2 recorded in metropolitan counties. This gap has widened over the course of the study period and speaks to a convergence of structural disadvantages: rural communities face shortages of addiction medicine specialists, longer travel distances to treatment facilities, weaker harm-reduction infrastructure, and economic distress that fuels substance use. The rural overdose crisis, which accelerated after fentanyl penetrated heroin and methamphetamine markets in the 2010s, has left many small communities with mortality rates that rival or exceed those of the worst-affected urban neighborhoods during the crack era, yet with far fewer resources to respond.

The recent decline since the 2021 peak offers genuine grounds for cautious optimism, and the timing is informative. The drop coincides with the expansion of naloxone distribution, the growth of medication-assisted treatment with buprenorphine and methadone, increased availability of fentanyl test strips following federal policy changes, and the stabilization of the post-pandemic environment. Yet the 2024 rate of 125.4 per 100,000 remains more than five times the level recorded in 1999, meaning that even after three years of improvement, Americans are dying from substance use disorders at a pace that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The authors emphasize that the burden remains substantially elevated and that the gains are fragile, unevenly distributed, and vulnerable to reversal if the drug supply shifts again or if funding for treatment and prevention contracts.

What emerges from this analysis is a portrait of a public health failure measured in millions of lives, but also a roadmap for targeted intervention. The persistence of stark disparities across sex, race and ethnicity, age, region, and urbanicity means that a one-size-fits-all national strategy will inevitably leave the hardest-hit communities behind. The study’s authors call for prevention, harm-reduction, and treatment strategies tailored to the populations and places where mortality concentrates: culturally grounded services for American Indian and Alaska Native communities, expanded access in rural counties, geriatric-aware addiction care, and sustained investment in the Midwest and New England. As the United States enters what may be a new phase of the epidemic, the data make clear that the recent downward trend is an opportunity, not a victory, and that closing the gaps documented here will determine whether the next quarter-century tells a different story.

Subject of Research: Long-term mortality trends and demographic and geographic disparities of substance use disorders among U.S. adults, 1999 to 2024

Article Title: Mortality trends of substance use disorders among adults in the United States, 1999–2024: a CDC WONDER analysis

Article References: Khan, S. A., Kumar, R., Arain, M. T., Qadir, A., Das, K., Dawood, M. H., & Yaqoob, A. (2026). Mortality trends of substance use disorders among adults in the United States, 1999–2024: a CDC WONDER analysis. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08649-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08649-y

Keywords: substance use disorders, mortality trends, CDC WONDER, health disparities, drug overdose, rural health, opioid crisis, age-adjusted mortality, joinpoint regression, United States, public health, BMC Psychiatry

The research team, led by Minobu Ikehara and colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry at Nara Medical University School of Medicine, examined a full decade of clinical data, spanning April 2014 to March 2024. Their cohort consisted of 344 patients who had been transported by emergency services to the hospital’s advanced emergency and critical care center following a suicide attempt and who were subsequently referred for formal psychiatric evaluation. This is a crucial detail: the study does not capture every suicide attempt in the community, but rather the subset severe enough to require critical care transport. That makes the findings especially relevant to general hospitals and emergency departments, which serve as the de facto front line of post-attempt psychiatric care in Japan and in many other countries.

Methodologically, the study took a careful, classification-driven approach. Both psychiatric diagnoses and suicide attempt methods were coded using categories derived from the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, or ICD-10, the diagnostic standard used widely across Japanese clinical settings. The primary analyses asked a deceptively simple question: do suicide attempt methods differ systematically by sex, by age group, and by psychiatric diagnosis? The researchers then went a step further with secondary analyses that compared patients whose attempts were classified as high lethality against those classified as low lethality, testing whether medical severity tracked cleanly with any of the demographic or diagnostic variables. Statistical associations were expressed as odds ratios with confidence intervals, the standard epidemiological machinery for quantifying how much more likely one method is within a given subgroup compared with the rest of the cohort.

The headline finding is that drug overdose was the most common method overall, and that it was significantly more frequent among female patients. This pattern echoes a well-documented international literature in which women who attempt suicide disproportionately use poisoning, particularly pharmaceutical overdose, while men more often use methods with higher intrinsic fatality. But the Japanese data add texture to that familiar story. Substance use disorders, for instance, were more frequent among male patients in the cohort, a diagnostic skew that carries its own clinical implications, since intoxication and impulsivity are known to interact dangerously in the moments surrounding an attempt. The sex differences, in other words, are not just about the physical method chosen; they extend into the underlying psychiatric landscape that clinicians must navigate during the post-attempt evaluation.

Age emerged as another powerful organizing variable. Drug overdose was more frequent among patients younger than 20 years, suggesting that adolescents and young adults in this emergency population gravitated toward the most accessible method—medications found in the home medicine cabinet or obtained by prescription. At the opposite end of the life course, pesticide poisoning was more frequent among patients aged 65 and older. This age-related shift is particularly sobering in the Japanese context, where agricultural chemicals are present in rural households and where late-life suicide remains a persistent public health concern. Pesticide ingestion is associated with high case fatality and with severe systemic toxicity, including organophosphate poisoning syndromes that demand intensive respiratory and neurological management. The fact that older patients in this cohort disproportionately arrived via this route means that emergency physicians and psychiatrists evaluating elderly survivors are, on average, dealing with a medically graver and methodologically distinct population than the one they encounter in younger patients.

Perhaps the most clinically provocative finding concerns psychiatric diagnosis. Jumping from height was more frequent among patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. This aligns with a broader international evidence base showing that psychotic illnesses are associated with elevated suicide risk and, in some studies, with the use of more violent or higher-lethality methods. The reasons are likely multifactorial: psychotic symptoms such as command hallucinations or delusional conviction can drive behavior with unusual directness, and the chronicity and social dislocation associated with severe mental illness may compound risk. For liaison psychiatry teams, the practical message is that the diagnostic formulation reached during the emergency evaluation should inform how the attempt itself is understood, not merely the treatment plan that follows it.

The secondary analyses on lethality add an important layer of nuance, and arguably constitute the study’s most consequential contribution to clinical practice. Patients in the high-lethality group were older on average than those in the low-lethality group, consistent with the pesticide finding among older adults and with the general observation that method lethality tends to rise with age. But—and this is the critical caveat—high- and low-lethality attempts were observed across all diagnostic categories. In other words, no psychiatric diagnosis guaranteed a low-lethality attempt, and no diagnosis made a high-lethality attempt inevitable. Medical severity, as measured in the critical care setting, did not map neatly onto diagnostic labels. A patient with a diagnosis often considered lower risk could still arrive in the intensive care unit, and a patient with severe mental illness could survive a medically minor attempt.

This is precisely why the authors argue against relying solely on categorized lethality when structuring post-attempt assessment. Their conclusion is that evaluation in general hospital settings should integrate demographic and diagnostic context, the observed suicide attempt method, and the actual medical severity of the presentation, rather than compressing all of that information into a single lethality category. The distinction matters because lethality classifications can be deceptively reassuring. A low-lethality label may reflect rescue, timing, or simple pharmacological luck rather than low suicidal intent, and a high-lethality label may reflect method availability as much as determination. By keeping method, demographics, diagnosis, and medical course in view simultaneously, clinicians can build a more honest and more individualized risk picture during the narrow window in which intervention is possible.

The study’s limitations are worth stating plainly, and the authors are transparent about them. It is a single-center retrospective analysis, drawing on records from one advanced emergency and critical care medical center in Nara Prefecture. That design means the findings describe patients who reached this particular hospital, and referral patterns, regional demographics, and local access to pesticides or medications could all shape the observed distributions. Retrospective designs also depend on the quality of recorded clinical data, and ICD-10-based categorizations, while standardized, necessarily flatten some clinical complexity. The cohort of 344 patients, while substantial for a decade of single-center recruitment, limits the statistical power available for fine-grained subgroup comparisons, which is why the reported associations are best read as directional signals to be tested in larger, multicenter samples rather than as definitive effect sizes.

Even with those caveats, the study lands at a moment when emergency psychiatry is under intense scrutiny worldwide. Suicide rates in Japan have remained a persistent national concern, with documented stresses including economic disruption and the psychological aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and emergency departments everywhere report rising volumes of psychiatric presentations. What this research offers is a template for evidence-based triage: know that a young woman arriving after overdose presents a different clinical configuration than an older man arriving after pesticide ingestion, and that a patient with psychosis who has jumped requires an assessment framework attuned to the specific risks of that diagnosis. None of these observations is a substitute for careful, individual clinical judgment—but together they give that judgment a firmer empirical footing. In suicide prevention, where every post-attempt contact may be the last chance to intervene, that footing is not a luxury. It is the difference between assessment as ritual and assessment as genuine, life-saving medicine.

Subject of Research: Associations between suicide attempt methods and sex, age, and psychiatric diagnosis among patients referred for psychiatric evaluation at a Japanese emergency and critical care medical center

Article Title: Suicide attempt methods among patients referred for psychiatric evaluation at an advanced emergency and critical care medical center in Japan: associations with sex, age, and psychiatric diagnosis: a single-center retrospective study

Article References: Ikehara, M., Takada, R., Okumura, K., Nishi, Y., Noriyama, Y., Hamano, Y., Mizui, R., Fujimoto, Y., Doi, F., Fukui, H., Honda, Y., Araki, S., Sunami, Y., Yamanaka, K., Urushitani, S., Nishikawa, N., Yamamuro, K., & Okada, T. (2026). Suicide attempt methods among patients referred for psychiatric evaluation at an advanced emergency and critical care medical center in Japan: associations with sex, age, and psychiatric diagnosis: a single-center retrospective study. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08681-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08681-y

Keywords: suicide attempt, emergency psychiatry, drug overdose, pesticide poisoning, psychiatric diagnosis, schizophrenia, lethality, ICD-10, Japan, retrospective study, substance use disorder, geriatric psychiatry

The research, led by Alice Matheux and colleagues at the Dijon University Hospital in France, set out to define postmortem reference concentrations for amlodipine, distinguishing levels compatible with harmless therapeutic exposure from those that may have contributed to death. The team reviewed 33 autopsy cases in which amlodipine had been quantified in postmortem jugular vein blood. Crucially, the classification of each case was made on the basis of autopsy findings and circumstantial evidence, deliberately independent of the measured amlodipine concentration, to avoid circular reasoning. Cases were assigned to one of two groups: deaths that were amlodipine-related or possibly related, designated G1, and deaths clearly unrelated to the drug, designated G2. This design allowed the researchers to compare the concentration distributions of the two groups statistically and to derive tentative interpretive thresholds from the boundary between them.

The analytical backbone of the study was a validated liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry method, abbreviated LC-HRMS. This technique separates the drug from the complex matrix of decomposing blood and then identifies and quantifies it by its exact mass and fragmentation pattern, offering specificity that older immunoassay or low-resolution methods cannot match. High-resolution mass spectrometry has become a cornerstone of modern forensic toxicology precisely because it can confirm molecular identity with near-certainty, reducing the risk of false positives that could unfairly implicate a medication in someone’s death. Once concentrations were obtained, the two groups were compared using a two-tailed Student’s t-test, a standard parametric test for assessing whether the means of two datasets differ beyond what random variation would predict.

The results were striking. Of the 33 cases, 16 fell into the amlodipine-related or possibly related group, with a median postmortem blood concentration of 115 micrograms per liter, and an interquartile range running from 85.5 to 255.5 micrograms per liter. The 17 unrelated deaths in the comparison group showed a median of just 41 micrograms per liter, with a first quartile of 31 and a third quartile of 87 micrograms per liter. The difference between the groups was statistically significant, with a p-value of 0.01, meaning there is roughly a one percent probability that a gap of this size would arise by chance if the two groups were truly drawn from the same distribution. From these figures, the authors proposed practical interpretive boundaries for casework.

According to the study, postmortem whole blood concentrations below approximately 90 micrograms per liter, and more precisely below 87 micrograms per liter based on their data, appear compatible with non-toxic exposure to amlodipine. Conversely, concentrations above roughly 250 to 300 micrograms per liter, with 255.5 micrograms per liter marking the threshold in their dataset, may indicate toxicity that contributed to death. These numbers may seem abstract, but they carry enormous weight in courtrooms and inquest rooms, where a toxicologist’s interpretation of a single blood concentration can determine whether a death is ruled accidental, suicidal, natural or suspicious. Between the two thresholds lies a gray zone where interpretation must lean heavily on autopsy findings, scene investigation and medical history.

Yet the study’s most conceptually important finding concerns not the lethal threshold but the apparently benign one. In the group of amlodipine-unrelated deaths, the median concentration of 41 micrograms per liter was 2.73 times higher than the therapeutic plasma concentrations observed in living patients, which typically range from 3 to 15 micrograms per liter. In other words, people who died of entirely unrelated causes, and who were presumably taking amlodipine at prescribed doses, showed postmortem blood levels that would look alarming if judged by clinical standards. A naive reading of such a result could wrongly suggest drug toxicity in a death that had nothing to do with the medication, or conversely could erode confidence in the entire interpretive framework.

The explanation lies in a phenomenon known as postmortem redistribution. After death, the body’s circulatory and cellular systems gradually break down, and drugs that had been concentrated in tissues begin to leak back into the blood. Organs such as the lungs, liver and myocardium act as reservoirs for certain compounds, particularly basic, lipophilic drugs that bind to acidic phospholipids in cell membranes. Amlodipine, with its long half-life and large volume of distribution, is a textbook candidate for this process. As tissue stores equilibrate with blood after death, concentrations in sampled blood can rise substantially above anything the living body ever experienced. The published blood-to-plasma ratio for amlodipine, described as 1.48 or 1.7 depending on the reference, does not fully account for the observed elevation, which points toward redistribution as the dominant mechanism.

Postmortem redistribution is one of the most treacherous pitfalls in forensic toxicology, and it is not unique to amlodipine. Drugs as diverse as digoxin, tricyclic antidepressants and many antipsychotics show similar postmortem drift, which is why forensic guidelines generally recommend sampling blood from peripheral sites such as the femoral vein, where redistribution tends to be less pronounced. The Dijon team sampled jugular vein blood, a central site more susceptible to redistribution effects, which the authors acknowledge as a consideration. Autopsy findings associated with elevated amlodipine concentrations have been described in the literature, and the new dataset adds weight to the argument that direct extrapolation from living therapeutic ranges to postmortem measurements is fundamentally unreliable for this drug.

The practical implications ripple outward from the mortuary. Emergency physicians know amlodipine overdose as a feared presentation, capable of producing refractory vasodilatory shock that resists standard resuscitation and has historically required unconventional measures such as high-dose insulin-glucose therapy. Fatalities from intentional and accidental overdose, including cases involving infants and elderly patients, have been documented for decades. But proving that amlodipine caused a particular death requires reliable concentration benchmarks, and until now, forensic practitioners have had to rely on scattered case reports and small series. By providing group-based medians and quartiles from systematically classified cases, the French team has given toxicologists a defensible starting point for interpretation, one anchored in the reality of postmortem chemistry rather than the pharmacology of the living.

The authors are careful to frame their conclusions as provisional. Thirty-three cases, while a meaningful addition to the literature, remain a modest sample, and the overlap between the two groups means individual concentrations near the thresholds cannot be interpreted in isolation. They call for further large-scale, multicenter studies to establish validated postmortem reference ranges for amlodipine, ideally incorporating peripheral blood sampling, tissue measurements and standardized case classification across institutions. Until such datasets exist, the Dijon results stand as both a warning and a tool: a warning that postmortem blood levels of this common medication can be dramatically inflated by the chemistry of death itself, and a tool that, used alongside autopsy findings and clinical context, helps distinguish the patient who died despite their blood pressure pills from the one who died because of them.

Subject of Research: Postmortem amlodipine concentrations and postmortem redistribution in forensic toxicology

Article Title: Postmortem amlodipine concentrations and postmortem redistribution: a retrospective study of 33 cases

Article References: Matheux, A., Amadieu, C., Pasquet, A., François-Purssell, I., Loiseau, M., & Guerard, P. (2026). Postmortem amlodipine concentrations and postmortem redistribution: a retrospective study of 33 cases. International Journal of Legal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-026-04014-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00414-026-04014-6

Keywords: amlodipine, forensic toxicology, postmortem redistribution, LC-HRMS, calcium channel blocker, autopsy, blood concentration thresholds, cardiogenic shock, pharmacokinetics, legal medicine, drug overdose, postmortem blood analysis

The study team, led by Anh P. Nguyen of the Institute for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, assembled a matched cohort of 100,140 people aged 12 years or older. Of these, 16,693 had received a diagnosis of cannabis use disorder, a clinical condition marked by impaired control over cannabis use, continued use despite harmful consequences, and physiological dependence in some patients. Each person with the disorder was compared against individuals without the diagnosis drawn from the same health system, allowing the researchers to isolate the association between the condition and mortality while accounting for shared characteristics of the patient population.

Follow-up extended through June 2024, with a median observation period of 7.7 years. Death records came from state vital statistics, enabling the team to classify not only whether people died but why. Over the follow-up window, 1,197 individuals with cannabis use disorder died, representing 7.2 percent of that group. The raw numbers were stark: people with the disorder died at a crude rate of 899.5 per 100,000 person-years, compared with 374.6 per 100,000 person-years among matched individuals without the diagnosis, a difference of more than a factor of two before any statistical adjustment.

Because people with substance use disorders often carry other health and social burdens, the investigators used Cox proportional hazards regression to adjust for confounding factors and estimate adjusted hazard ratios. Even after this statistical correction, the signal remained strong. Cannabis use disorder was associated with a 52 percent higher risk of death from any cause, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.52 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.30 to 1.77. The confidence interval excludes the null value of 1.0, indicating that the association is unlikely to be explained by random variation in the data.

The researchers then split deaths into two broad categories: injury-related and illness-related. Injury deaths, which include overdoses, accidents, and self-harm, occurred at a crude rate of 295.3 per 100,000 person-years among people with cannabis use disorder versus 62.5 among matched comparators, nearly a fivefold difference in unadjusted rates. After adjustment, the disorder was associated with a 91 percent higher risk of injury-related death, with a hazard ratio of 1.91 and a confidence interval of 1.37 to 2.67. Illness-related mortality, covering deaths from disease, was also elevated, at 604.2 versus 312.1 per 100,000 person-years in crude terms, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.40.

Drilling down into specific causes of death revealed a differentiated pattern. The strongest association was with drug overdose: people with cannabis use disorder had nearly 2.6 times the risk of dying from an overdose, with a hazard ratio of 2.59 and a confidence interval of 1.30 to 5.19. This finding aligns with a growing body of evidence that cannabis use disorder frequently co-occurs with other substance use disorders, and that polysubstance use multiplies overdose danger. Deaths from accidents were also significantly elevated, with a hazard ratio of 1.96, consistent with concerns about impairment-related injuries in an era of expanding cannabis availability.

Cancer mortality emerged as another significant contributor, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.71 and a confidence interval of 1.20 to 2.46. The authors and related literature note that cannabis is most commonly consumed by smoking, and recent observational studies have begun to examine links between cannabis smoking and lung cancer as well as broader cancer risk in the context of legalized access. By contrast, the study found no statistically significant elevation in deaths from self-harm, cardiovascular disease, or respiratory disease. The hazard ratios for those causes were 1.18, 1.25, and 1.29 respectively, but all of their confidence intervals crossed 1.0, meaning the data could not distinguish those estimates from no increased risk.

The findings arrive at a moment of rapid change in the American cannabis landscape. Self-reported cannabis use in the United States has risen markedly over recent decades, and prior research has documented increases in cannabis use disorder following recreational legalization in several states. National surveys have also shown that the prevalence of marijuana use disorders grew substantially between the early 2000s and the early 2010s. Yet cannabis use disorder remains underrecognized in routine care, and evidence on mortality among affected individuals has historically been limited, often relying on treatment-seeking populations or emergency department cohorts rather than broad health-system samples.

The new study adds to a small but growing literature. A 2025 analysis published in JAMA Network Open linked cannabis use disorder-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations to elevated five-year mortality, and a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies reported increased all-cause mortality associated with cannabis use. The Colorado cohort strengthens this evidence base by using matched comparison individuals from the same integrated health system, by capturing deaths through official vital records rather than electronic health data alone, and by distinguishing injury-related from illness-related causes of death within a single analytic framework.

The authors caution that the study is observational: it identifies associations, not proof of causation, and cannabis use disorder may act partly as a marker for a constellation of risks, including co-occurring substance use, mental health conditions, and social determinants of health that themselves predict premature death. Still, the researchers conclude that a diagnosis of cannabis use disorder may serve as a clinically meaningful signal of elevated all-cause, injury-related, and illness-related mortality risk, and they call for comprehensive prevention strategies to address the heightened risk in this population. As cannabis potency and availability continue to climb, the study suggests that identifying and treating cannabis use disorder in primary care settings could become an increasingly important piece of the mortality-prevention puzzle.

Subject of Research: Mortality risk associated with cannabis use disorder in a matched Colorado health system cohort

Article Title: Cannabis Use Disorder and Mortality Risk: A Matched Cohort Study from a Colorado Health System

Article References: Nguyen, A. P., Narwaney, K. J., Lyons, J. A., Ford, M. A., & Steiner, C. A. (2026). Cannabis Use Disorder and Mortality Risk: A Matched Cohort Study from a Colorado Health System. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10845-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10845-1

Keywords: cannabis use disorder, mortality, matched cohort study, drug overdose, cancer, injury-related death, Cox proportional hazards, Colorado, public health, substance use, epidemiology, Journal of General Internal Medicine