Not just numbers: Vaidehee Lanke tracks opiate use and perinatal health
In this episode, medical student and graduate researcher Vaidehee Lanke shares what large provincial datasets reveal about opioid use disorder, maternal mental health, and pregnancy.
By Jen Quesnel for RESEARCHERS UNDER THE SCOPE
Researchers Under the Scope is produced by the Office of the Vice-Dean Research in the College of Medicine.
Armed with data, she hopes better support —before, during, and after birth—can change outcomes for mothers and babies.
Lanke spent her summer working with epidemiologist Dr. Nazeem Muhajarine (PhD) and the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit on a pan-Canadian project tracking opioid use in perinatal populations across five provinces.
“The question we set out to answer was: What is the association between opioid use disorder and perinatal mental health conditions?” Lanke said. Opioids in excess are linked to maternal death, stillbirth, and poor fetal growth.
Using hospital discharge records, ambulatory care data, and physicians’ billing data from 2016–2024, Muhajarine's team is assembling a provincial cohort of pregnant patients to study when, and how often opioid use disorder and mental health challenges collide.
“It's like that critical thinking piece, like how to look at massive amounts of data and make sense of it,” said Lanke, who earned her masters in epidemiology at McGill University before returning home to Saskatoon to attend medical school.
“Sometimes [with code] you're poring over it, and it's like that little comma or like, you know, semicolon, that makes all that difference.”
Lanke calls strong public health the ‘backbone’ of medicine. She says bioinformatics and epidemiology can pinpoint when and where to intervene more effectively with high-risk mothers and infants.
“This was a dream project for me, because it brought together all my different worlds,” she said.
(Runs 13:51)