In this episode, medical student and researcher Vaidehee Lanke shares what large provincial datasets reveal about opioid use disorder, maternal mental health, and pregnancy.

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. Nadeem Muhajarine 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 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, semi colon, that makes all that difference."

Lanke calls strong public health the 'backbone' of medicine. She sees computational biology as a way to 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.