35 research outputs found
An overview of recent developments in the analytical detection of new psychoactive substances (NPSs)
New psychoactive substances (NPSs), sometimes referred to as “legal highs” in more colloquial environments/
the media, are a class of compounds that have been recently made available for abuse (not
necessarily recently discovered) which provide similar effects to the traditional well studied illegal drugs
but are not always controlled under existing local, regional or international drug legislation. Following an
unprecedented increase in the number of NPSs in the last 5 years (with 101 substances discovered for the
first time in 2014 alone) its, occasionally fatal, consequences have been extensively reported in the media.
Such NPSs are typically marketed as ‘not for human consumption’ and are instead labelled and sold as
plant food, bath salts as well as a whole host of other equally nondescript aliases in order to bypass legislative
controls. NPSs are a new multi-disciplinary research field with the main emphasis in terms of forensic
identification due to their adverse health effects, which can range from minimal to life threatening and
even fatalities. In this mini-review we overview this recent emerging research area of NPSs and the
analytical approaches reported to provide detection strategies as well as detailing recent reports towards
providing point-of-care/in-the-field NPS (“legal high”) sensors
A further consideration in the application of an analysis-of-variance model for the intrasubject replication design
It is argued that the analysis-of-variance model is inappropriate for assessing treatment effects in single-subject designs. In particular, such designs are demonstrated to violate the crucial assumption concerning the statistical independence of observations. Alternative methods of data analysis are suggested