By Zac Amos, Features Editor, ReHack
LinkedIn:Â Zachary Amos
LinkedIn:Â ReHack Magazine
The conditions of American health care have developed many positive and negative associations. The opioid problem is one of the most pressing crises in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Artificial intelligence (AI) could be an unexpected hero in the next era of this fight.
The State of America’s Opioid Crisis
For years, the U.S. overprescribed opioids like hydrocodone, which led to widespread misuse. Additionally, illegal synthetic drugs like fentanyl are rising and heroin remains a concern.
In 2022, nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdose, and about 76% of these fatalities were attributed to opioids. This is a tenfold increase from 1999, despite some stabilization in upward trends in the last several years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes the opioid crisis in three waves, signifying spikes in overdose deaths and new types of drugs being abused.
Despite warnings, these drugs are deceptively addictive and require extensive prevention and recovery measures to overcome. Numerous efforts have attempted to quell this problem in America for decades. It is a medical issue but also a public health, civil rights, class and child welfare problem. The most recent innovative idea is to use AI as a multifaceted approach.
Ways Experts Can Use AI to Combat the Problem
AI has many functionalities useful for opioid research, treatment and prevention. What are some ways health care professionals can enhance remediation?
Synthesizing Data
A social work professor from Columbia University collected data from four vulnerable states about drug use. She has put years of data into a generative AI, hoping it will train members working in opioid-related initiatives at the National Institutes of Health.
This subset of deep learning makes her model capable of writing content that replicates human-written action plans. The model is highly specific because the data she collected included interviews and in-depth personal information. The AI is an agent-based model, which gives customized intervention strategies based on specific communities.
Identifying Vulnerable Populations
Once AI understands a dataset, it can provide information to trainees and more. By taking data from numerous organizations, including the Census or academic surveys, health care stakeholders can find the most problematic regions for opioids in seconds. They can effectively predict the communities most likely to develop dependencies.
Drug Discovery
Treatment is one of the trickiest aspects of dealing with the opioid crisis. The drugs feed receptors in the brain as if it is receiving a reward. Eventually, this part of the brain adapts, needing more stimuli to feel good. This is why withdrawal is so intense. Recovery plans must make withdrawal less emotionally and physically demanding on patients to make it easier to justify quitting.
Experts suggest AI could take large amounts of data and comb through it faster than humans to find recipes for novel medicines. This could include a protein blocker that can make receptors causing withdrawal less powerful during recovery. AI could sift through medical data and discover the prime candidates for ingredients in a fraction of the time and financial investment.
Personalized Treatment
This hints at a future where doctors will have unique recovery plans for every patient dealing with opioid use disorder. Eventually, quantum AI will push personalized pharmaceuticals further by acknowledging the specific health history and molecular interactions in one person to generate the most effective medicine.
Until this becomes more advanced, other AI models will do what they can to understand how brains function on the drugs. Neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Golden Lab decided to understand the root of addiction with AI to learn how to better issue individualized therapies.
Many projects have tested the impacts of addiction on mice, but few have accompanied these efforts with machine learning’s power. It could revolutionize the medical sector’s understanding of relapses, withdrawal and overcoming dependence.
Curbing Crises With Creativity
Health professionals could underestimate how AI can penetrate the opioid crisis. It could change every phase of the discovery and recovery processes, including emotional support to generating customized treatment plans. Health care enterprises must adopt AI as part of the solution to America’s opioid crisis, as it will take multiple strategies to eliminate it for good.