Incident Stimulant Use Disorder Diagnoses in British Columbia, 2013-2024

38,217 people were identified with incident stimulant use disorder diagnoses in British Columbia between January 1, 2013 and March 31, 2024. The data was analyzed by Roshni Desai using interrupted time series methods to assess trends before and after the COVID-19 pandemic declaration. The study found an average diagnosis rate of 5.18 per 100,000 pre-pandemic, increasing by 19.9% to 6.21 per 100,000 post-pandemic.

Use Cases

• Analyzing trends in stimulant use disorder diagnosis rates based on the reported monthly time series data.
• Modeling the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health outcomes based on the interrupted time series analysis framework.
• Comparing demographic and health service contact patterns for populations diagnosed before and after March 2020.
• Estimating changes in incident StUD diagnosis slopes using seasonal ARIMA models as described in the methodology.

Strengths

• Contains data on 38,217 individuals with incident stimulant use disorder diagnoses.
• Covers a substantial time period from January 2013 to March 2024.
• Provides specific diagnosis rates: 5.18 per 100,000 pre-pandemic and 6.21 per 100,000 post-pandemic.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The underlying data file is a 348.6 KB DOCX document, which is a small and non-standard format for structured data analysis.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Population-based study using administrative health data and interrupted time series analysis.

Time Range

January 1, 2013 to March 31, 2024

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-07 05:34:32; freshness should be verified.

Geography

British Columbia, Canada