Student’s opioid research published

By Christina Galeone  | CFP Correspondent

“Drugs have inflicted a deep wound on our society and ensnared many people in their web,” Pope Francis said in 2016 at a Pontifical Academy of Sciences meeting. Recently, a student at St. John’s High School in Shrewsbury joined the global fight against the enslavement of addiction that Pope Francis has spoken about. And he did so through an astonishing achievement.
Adway S. Wadekar’s research showed that a young person’s use of marijuana can be a precursor to opioid abuse later in life. His article, “Understanding Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) Using Tree-Based Classifiers,” was published in a 2020 issue of the scientific, peer-reviewed journal “Drug and Alcohol Dependence.”
Although Adway hasn’t been personally affected by the opioid epidemic, he said that he’s aware of how substance addiction can ruin people’s lives and harm their families and communities. And he noticed that opioid addiction has hurt people from a wide variety of social, economic, racial and ethnic backgrounds. Because of this, the high school junior wanted to know what causes addiction to opioids (a class of drugs that includes illegal substances such as heroin, as well as prescription pain killers such as oxycodone and morphine).
His curiosity motivated him to study the scientific research that had already been done in that area.
“I noticed that not much work had been done to understand the underlying causes of opioid use disorder considering a multitude of factors synergistically,” Adway said, noting that researchers seemed to focus on “correlating individual factors to OUD instead of considering the complex nature of a person’s sphere of life.”
He added, “I wanted to develop a more comprehensive approach to consider these factors in an integrated manner, which ultimately led to my decision to use more robust computational methods that are capable of handling interactions among these factors.”  
The research he did concluded that a person’s use of marijuana before the age of 18 is a major predictor of opioid use disorder among adults. According to his article, curbing “early initiation of marijuana may be an effective prevention strategy against opioid addiction.”
He said the research also has been satisfying on a personal level.
“I was very, very excited when I learned that this work was going to be published in a journal,” Adway said. “It’s not every day that a high school student publishes in a peer-reviewed publication, and it certainly seldom happens if the high schooler is the first and/or only author.”
Russell McClintock, the chairman of the social studies department at St. John’s, couldn’t agree more. He described Adway’s achievement, at such a young age, as incredible and startling. 
“What makes Adway’s story unique is that he researched and wrote his paper by himself,” Mr. McClintock said. “He conceived the idea, crafted the research questions, identified and mastered the best methodology for answering those questions, located and utilized the best available data … analyzed the results, wrote up his conclusions, submitted his findings to a reputable scholarly journal – and actually got it accepted! It’s a complex, painstaking process that most scholars don’t fully navigate until graduate school or after.”   
But what’s more impressive is the potential impact of the teen’s work.
“Adway has created a program that identifies the biggest predictors of whether a person will become addicted to opioids…,” Mr. McClintock said. “Using a system called ‘machine  learning,’ his program filters the answers to a massive nationwide health survey [2016 edition of the “National Survey on Drug Use and Health”], an extremely detailed questionnaire … that was answered by hundreds of thousands of Americans, to identify those factors that are most likely to lead to opioid abuse and addiction. Used properly, Adway’s findings could literally save lives and have begun to attract the attention of health experts.”
Adway also has high hopes concerning the impact his article can have on the world. He said that he believes that his work can “help make the case for classifying marijuana as a gateway drug,” a drug that frequently leads its users to try deadlier, more addictive substances.  
Besides the medical world, his research may benefit the political world.
“I hope that my work may spark a debate within not only the scientific community, but also within state legislatures and governors’ offices,” he said. “Because the problem of OUD transcends any particular cohort of individuals, it is incredibly important to gain a clear understanding of it, and my work may just provide relevant information that can aid policymakers in making sure that we as a society remain healthy.”
“It is important to become cognizant of all the facets and implications of a potential piece of legislation before signing it into law,” Adway said.