Student research spotlight: Cindy Mao
Rising third-year medical student Cindy Mao was one of more than 200 NEOMED students to present their scholarly work at the 2025 Student Research Symposium last fall. Mao shared with The Pulse the inspiration for her work, what she learned and next steps for her research, titled “Referrals of Pediatric Patients to Adult Complex Care Multidisciplinary Clinic.”
What was your inspiration to study adolescent substance use?
I've always been interested in public health and how research findings can identify upstream disparities and influence organizational and public policy to improve the health of individuals and communities. My undergraduate research focused on social facilitation on alcohol misuse and perceptions of cognition and humor with concurrent substance use. At NEOMED, I've continued this interest in substance use research and was glad to get connected with Dr. Stacey Gardner-Buckshaw, Hannah Haynie, and our Akron Children's Hospital partners for this project.
What were some of your main findings?
The dataset we utilized was from a quality improvement project conducted by Akron Children's a few years ago that collected substance use screening data at outpatient well-child visits aged 12-18. Using these data, along with patient demographics like age, sex, race, insurance status, family history of substance use disorder, and childhood opportunity based on ZIP code-level data, we analyzed metrics that may influence substance use in adolescence. We found that age at first patient encounter, insurance status (public vs. private) and family history, in that order, were the best predictors for a young person to report substance use.
How will your research improve health for the public?
This contributes to a richer understanding of which populations of adolescents are most at risk of substance use disorder and where gaps in clinical care interventions exist. It supports previous recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics to begin substance use screening in adolescence, and will inform universal substance use screening practices and thus earlier interventions when unhealthy behaviors arise. We can use particular demographic factors as a proxy for socioeconomic stratifications and identify population-level patterns that can inform systematic approaches to reduce long-term substance use and the associated consequences.
What are your next steps?
This study used a dataset with focus on particular substances like alcohol, marijuana and illicit drugs, and prescription abuse. Given the rise in nicotine use among adolescents, our next step is to analyze additional data on tobacco and nicotine use to better understand emerging and pertinent trends in adolescent substance use. There are further opportunities to extract meaningful insights from the existing dataset, which we plan to explore in future analyses.