Biasing factors in the measurement of trends in heroin use.
A number of articles concerned with the epidemiology of heroin use which have appeared recently report that there has been a major "epidemic" of heroin use in the United States in the past decade and that the epidemic has been subsiding since about 1970. An examination of a number of biases inherent in the indirect measures of heroin use with which these conclusions have been reached and a growing body of direct, population-wide survey data indicates that these conclusions are not wholly warranted, and that if there was any epidemic of heroin use at all it was probably rather modest in intensity.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D005260:Female; D006556:Heroin Dependence / Q000453:epidemiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011159:Population Surveillance; D011336:Probability; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014481:United States