NOVEMBER 2024

Opioid Industry Documents

Fentanyl and other opioid addiction issues have permeated the news; in election coverage, the impact on public health, and local responses on the ground.

While the overprescribing of opioids has been linked to the increase in opioid addiction, since 2015 the majority of illicit opioid use involves fentanyl, including users who were originally prescribed opioids and can no longer access the prescription drugs. The release of the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, created by UCSF and Johns Hopkins University in 2021, allows researchers to look at opioid manufacturer decisions and practices that led to this uptick in overprescribing. Dorie Apollonio, PhD, MPP, and colleagues researched the strategies used by opioid manufacturers to recruit health professionals and identified provider training gaps that could be met with continued education training as one step to reducing overprescribing and its harms.

IHPS FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

Yingning Wang, PhD

Dr. Wang is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Health & Aging at the School of Nursing and an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. As a health economist, Dr. Wang brings extensive experience in studying the economic impacts of tobacco use, assessing the costs of tobacco use, and evaluating the effects of tobacco control policies on priority populations such as youth and young adults, individuals with low socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic minorities, and rural communities.

Her research interests include emerging tobacco products, cannabis, and the application of machine learning to analyze social media data. Dr. Wang has extensive expertise in developing rigorous economic models and working with large population survey data. Her research has been published in leading public health and tobacco control journals.

CURRENT ISSUES

Youth Mental Health

Youth mental health has been a focus of the scrutiny of social media platforms over the last several years. Social media outlets have responded to criticism in a variety of ways, often with restrictions on what young people have access to, such as TikTok's recent decision to eliminate beauty filters from its platform. Instagram has rolled out new "teen controls". While these measures may prove helpful, it is the community members around young people that may have a more direct impact on accessing mental and behavioral health services for youth. IHPS faculty have researched this from a variety of angles. Samira Soleimanpour, PhD, found the Youth Mental Health First Aid (YMHFA), a training program which trains individuals who regularly interact with youth to identify youth experiencing mental health challenges, has an overall positive effect on those who participate in it. Family is often key in supporting youth in need of behavioral health services. When youth are impacted by the child welfare system, this support can be difficult to deliver. Marina Tolou-Shams, PhD, has conducted a pilot trial of the Family Telehealth Project, a skills-based telehealth intervention for families impacted by the child welfare system, showing a high level of being both feasible and accepted by families.

EVENTS

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

IHPS IN THE NEWS

Since its founding 50 years ago, IHPS has been dedicated to training the next generation of leaders in interdisciplinary research to solve our most important health policy issues. In celebration of our 50th anniversary and to honor our founders, Phil Lee and Lew Butler, we established an endowment fund for the Philip R. Lee Fellowship. We are pleased to announce the fund has been endowed! We hope to continue to keep this fund and our fellowship program robust.