Researchers have been studying opioid use for decades, trying to figure out how to help people with addiction issues. There are tens of thousands of studies examining opioid use disorder from many angles. But what use is a study if you don鈥檛 know it exists?
To make this information more accessible, Dr. David Krag of the University of Vermont Medical Center and Larner College of Medicine is leading a team that's developing a database of research on opioid use disorder. The database can be accessed on , where users can create a free login for access.
Krag and a member of that team, first year medical student Ashley Sharma, joined Vermont Edition on Monday to discuss their work.
Reviewing thousands of articles
The total number of peer-reviewed medical journal articles on opioid use disorder is quite daunting 鈥� around 43,000. So far, Krag and his team have inputted about 900 articles into the database. He said they hope to finish the project within three years.
"A busy doctor, maybe they'll read 10, maybe 100, a year," Krag said. "It's not even possible to come close."
Sharma joined the project a couple months ago and described the database as "a very organized kind of flow chart of information."
"My role is to put the extracted data into where I think it makes sense thematically, so we can pick up patterns and derive those insights," Sharma said.
A caller asked if AI could be used to distill down the massive body of information. Sharma said that while AI is very efficient, it misses nuances that only humans can understand.
"AI is really good at looking stuff up, but it doesn't make judgments, and it can't connect the dots of information that haven't already been connected," Krag said. "And that's human imagination."
Addressing policy
Krag hopes the database can be used by policymakers in Vermont as they work to address the opioid crisis.
"We have now scrubbed down almost all of the world's literature on this, and it's available in this database," Krag said. "And some of the concerns that were raised by legislators were, 'Oh, well, we're Vermont, you know, we're different.' But the literature is filled with places of similar size."
Krag called the project a "knowledge broker for opioid disease." His team tested the knowledge base of state senators, representatives and select board members across Vermont and found that using the database increased their confidence.
Understanding opioid use disorder
Krag's work as a surgical oncologist focuses on breast cancer. He said it was a "closet disease" 35 years ago. Activists brought the conversation out to the open, in a way that's happening now with opioid use disorder.
Sharma, who has a master's degree in public health, said that her approach to problem solving is threefold: identifying the problem, designing an intervention, and then administering that intervention. One of the things she's learned through doing this project is that there isn't an understanding of the opioid crisis as a whole.
"We don't have an understanding of all the barriers that people face, all the factors that contribute to the opioid use epidemic, all the different perspectives and attitudes that different stakeholders have when it comes to this and all the different factors that need to be considered when we do try to devise solutions to resolve this epidemic," she said.
Krag said that beginning to understand opioid use disorder starts with acknowledging that it's a disease, and "diseases get studied by doctors and researchers."
His son, Peter, passed way from opioid use disorder in May 2020. He finds that his work on this database is a way to help others.
"When it hits a family, you do everything you can," he said.
Note: This episode of Vermont Edition included a conversation with Theresa Vezina, special assistant for overdose prevention center implementation appointed by Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanek. Vezina shared a status update of the proposed overdose prevention center.
Broadcast live on Monday, March 10, 2025, at noon; rebroadcast at 7 p.m.
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