American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse

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Background: While medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) are effective in reducing overdoses, widespread adoption and implementation of MOUD remains inadequate. Innovative approaches to promote MOUD use and to support people in their medication-assisted recovery (MAR) are needed. Recovery residences that serve people taking MOUD are steadily growing in number, yet little is known about how MOUD and the MAR pathway is promoted within the recovery residence setting. Objectives: The purpose of this qualitative analysis was to describe how recovery residences facilitate MOUD initiation and support residents' MAR pathway...

Background: The concurrence of homelessness and alcohol use disorder (AUD) has negative consequences in affected individuals. Managed alcohol programs (MAPs), a harm reduction strategy based on providing regular doses of alcohol to individuals with AUD, have emerged as a potential solution to reduce alcohol-related harms. Objectives: This study examined the impact of a MAP implemented in Barcelona on patterns of alcohol and other psychoactive substance use, health, and quality of life among people who use drugs and were experiencing homelessness...

Background: Traveling to meet sexual partners and substance use are associated with increased risk of infectious disease. It is important to understand what factors may increase substances use or increased infection transmission risk (IITR) sexual behaviors among rural LGBTQ+ individuals. Objective: This study investigates substance use and sexual behaviors associated with increased infection transmission risk among rural LGBTQ+ individuals, and how these are associated with relationship type (friends or romantic partners) and travel distance...

Background: Long-term use of supraphysiologic doses of anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) has been associated with impaired visuospatial memory in young men but little is known about its cognitive effects in middle-aged men. Objectives: We compared cognition in middle-aged men with histories of long-term AAS use and age-matched non-users. Methods: We administered cognitive tests from the CANTAB battery to 76 weightlifters aged 37-60 years (mean [SD] 48.5 [6.5] years), of whom 51 reported at least 2 years of cumulative AAS use and 25 reported no AAS exposure...

Background: Rural and frontier communities face high rates of opioid use disorders (OUDs). In 2021, the Rural Addiction Implementation Network (RAIN) sought to establish a rural hospital/clinic-system practice-based research network (RH-PBRN) to facilitate implementation of evidence-based addiction-related prevention, treatment, and recovery (PTR) services to reduce the morbidity of OUD and substance use disorder (SUD) in rural communities. Objective: To describe the goals and implementation of PTR activities of RAIN, a novel RH-PBRN...

Background: Although nitrous oxide (N₂O) is increasingly misused recreationally, its use and risks among medical students who have professional access to it are rarely explored. Objectives: To investigate the recreational use of N₂O among medical students in Paris Region (France). Methods: This cross-sectional study used an online questionnaire distributed in 2022 through social networks, to all medical students (undergraduate student from the 2nd year of medical studies to residents until the end of the residency) from the six medical universities in Paris Region...

Background: Alcoholic liver disease (ALD) significantly contributes to global morbidity and mortality. The role of inflammatory cytokines in alcohol-induced liver injury is pivotal yet not fully elucidated. Objectives: To establish a causal link between inflammatory cytokines and ALD using a Mendelian Randomization (MR) framework. Methods: This MR study utilized genome-wide significant variants as instrumental variables (IVs) for assessing the relationship between inflammatory cytokines and ALD risk, focusing on individuals of European descent...

Background: Rural areas in the United States have been severely impacted by recent rises in substance use related mortality and psychosocial consequences. There is a dearth of treatment resources to address substance use disorder (SUD). Rural recovery houses (RRH) are important services that provide individuals with SUD with an environment where they can engage in recovery-oriented activities, but dropout rates are unacceptably high, and evidence-based interventions such as contingency management (CM) may reduce dropout and improve outcomes for RRH residents...

Background: Medication disposal programs have been promoted as one solution to the opioid crisis, but uptake by community members has been minimal. Objectives: To clarify perceptions of medication disposal options among people who have been prescribed an opioid analgesic in North Carolina to inform interventions that can facilitate the disposal of unused opioids. Methods: In 2022, we conducted focus groups with participants who received an opioid medication in the past year to gain information to develop an intervention related to the disposal of unused opioid medication (12 focus group discussions (FGDs); total N  = 37; 30 identified as female, 6 as male, and 1 as another gender)...

Background: Longitudinal Measurement Invariance (LMI) is critically important to evaluate changes in alcohol expectancies over time. However, past research has not explored the longitudinal properties of the Spanish Expectancy Questionnaire Short Form (EQ-SF). Objectives: To examine the reliability, sources of validity (structural, invariance across sex, and concurrent validity), and LMI of the Spanish EQ-SF among young adults who engage in binge drinking. Methods: Participants ( n  = 279; 48...

Background: X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is a widely used substance analysis technique. It bases on the different absorption coefficients at different energy level to achieve material identification. Additionally, the combination of spectral technology and deep learning can achieve auto detection and high accuracy in material identification. Objectives: Current methods are difficult to identify drugs quickly and nondestructively. Therefore, we explore a novel approach utilizing XAS for the detection of prohibited drugs with common X-ray tube source and photon-counting (PC) detector...

Background: Many national studies fail to account for discordance between sexual orientation dimensions (e.g. a mismatch between sexual identity and sexual attraction) or sexual identity fluidity (e.g. changes in sexual identity over time). Objective: To examine the longitudinal relationships among sexual identity fluidity/stability, sexual orientation discordance/concordance, and alcohol and other drug use disorder symptoms. Methods: The study used nationally representative longitudinal data from Waves 1-5 (2013-2019) of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study of US adolescents and adults ( N = 24,591)...

Background: Little is known regarding the extent to which substance use disorder (SUD) treatment facilities adopt comprehensive services to meet patients' medical and social needs. Objective: To examine trends in the availability of comprehensive services within outpatient SUD treatment facilities from 2018 to 2022. Methods: We used data from the Mental Health and Addiction Treatment Tracking Repository, a national database of SUD treatment facilities ( n  = 13,793). We examined the availability of four domains of comprehensive services and four types of SUD treatment services from 2018 to 2022...

Background: Alcohol and prescription opioid use are highly prevalent among chronic pain populations. One-fifth of individuals prescribed opioids report same-day use of alcohol and opioids. Alcohol use and alcohol/opioid co-use can have deleterious pain management and health outcomes. The extent to which individuals with chronic pain are aware of these deleterious outcomes is considerably understudied. Objectives: To explore individuals' understanding of seven health- and pain-related risks of alcohol/alcohol-opioid use...

Background: Innovative analytic approaches to drug studies are needed to understand better the co-use of opioids with non-opioids among people using illicit drugs. One approach is the Bayesian kernel machine regression (BKMR), widely applied in environmental epidemiology to study exposure mixtures but has received far less attention in substance use research. Objective: To describe the utility of the BKMR approach to study the effects of drug substance mixtures on health outcomes. Methods: We simulated data for 200 individuals...

Background: Despite an increase in the varieties of cannabis products available for consumption, limited evidence is available about the patterns of cannabis consumption methods before and after legalization. Objectives: To examine the changes in modes of cannabis use and their correlates among adults in Ontario, Canada both prior to and following cannabis legalization in 2018. Methods: Data were utilized from the 2017 to 2022 Centre for Addiction and Mental Health's (CAMH) Monitor study, a repeated cross-sectional survey of adults 18 years of age and older ( n  = 2,665; 56% male)...

Background: Anger is elevated in substance use disorders (SUDs) and related to problematic use. However, it is unclear whether anger is elevated in individuals who use substances, is only heightened among those with SUDs, and whether anger is more strongly tied to use of certain substances or SUDs. Objectives: We examine the association between anger, general substance use and SUDs. Methods: Data is N  = 28,753 (55% female) respondents from the NESARC-III. Participants endorsing anger and indicating negative functional impact were deemed to have experienced significant anger...

Background: Ethanol consumption during pregnancy induces enduring detrimental effects in the offspring, manifesting as a spectrum of symptoms collectively termed as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD). Presently, there is a scarcity of treatments for FASD. Objectives: To analyze current literature, emphasizing evidence derived from preclinical models, that could potentially inform therapeutic interventions for FASD. Methods: A narrative review was conducted focusing on four prospective treatments: nutritional supplements, antioxidants, anti-inflammatory compounds and environmental enrichment...

Background: Substance use disorders (SUDs) are heterogeneous across multiple functional domains. Various frameworks posit that domains (e.g., executive function) contribute to the persistence of SUDs; however, the domains identified in different studies vary. Objectives: We used factor analysis to identify the underlying latent domains present in a large sample ( N  = 5,244, 55.8% male) with a variety of SUDs to yield findings more generalizable than studies with a narrower focus. Method: Participants (1,384 controls and 3,860 participants with one or more SUDs including alcohol, cocaine, cannabis, and/or opioid use disorders) completed the Semi-Structured Assessment for Drug Dependence and Alcoholism, the NEO Personality Inventory, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test...