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The opioid crisis usually grabs the headlines for its worst moments: the overdoses, the ER runs, the lives lost. More than 7,000 Canadians die each year, and thousands more land in hospital. But psychiatry researcher Myanca Rodrigues says there’s a broader crisis we don’t talk about enough – the hundreds of thousands of people living with opioid addiction, or opioid use disorder (OUD). 

And that matters, because OUD doesn’t just steal lives suddenly; it also chips away at them slowly, says Dr. Rodrigues, who arrived at Queen’s this fall on a two-year Banting Post-doctoral Fellowship. “As you can imagine, living with OUD can affect many areas of health, but we still don’t fully understand the long-term consequences, particularly with today’s evolving toxic drug supply.” 

Dr. Rodrigues is looking to help fill that knowledge gap. She started with her PhD work in health research methodology at McMaster University, where she found that cardiovascular, metabolic, and respiratory diseases tended to cluster together in people with opioid dependence. That supported other early research that has also shown those lasting health effects can be brutal – heart disease, liver trouble, lung damage, even HIV and hepatitis C.

Now at Queen’s, Dr. Rodrigues has made it part of her mission to try to understand the predictors and risks of people getting two or more of these conditions from fentanyl use. She’s also looking into how fentanyl use impacts when and how people access ERs, hospitals, and outpatient facilities, with the aim of improving the ongoing care these individuals need.

Dr. Rodrigues became interested in this work while volunteering at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and later as a master’s student in epidemiology and biostatistics at Western University. “I saw how much we often treat mental and physical illnesses as separate, but people with mental illnesses often have really pressing health concerns,” she says. “At the same time, Canada’s opioid crisis was just getting worse and worse, and I wanted to use my knowledge to try to help.”

She’s now doing that, and she’s getting a big hand from the latest methods in machine learning and biostatistics. Her goal is simple but ambitious: to do everything she can to ease the long-term health toll of opioid addiction – and to give health-care workers on the front lines the support they need.  

“We know the health-care system is stretched; the challenge is how to adapt it to meet these long-term needs,” says Dr. Rodrigues.