Harm reduction behaviors are associated with carrying naloxone among patients on methadone treatment

Despite the widespread availability of naloxone, US opioid overdose rates continue to rise. The “Cascade of Care” (CoC) is a public health approach that identifies steps in achieving specific outcomes and has been used to identify gaps in naloxone carriage among individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD). We sought to apply this framework to a treatment-seeking population with OUD that may be more inclined to engage in harm reduction behaviors. Patients were recruited from an urban methadone program to complete a survey. We assessed naloxone familiarity, availability, obtainability, training, and possession, as well as naloxone carriage rates, demographics, and harm reduction behaviors. A multivariable logistic regression examined associations between naloxone carriage and individual-level factors. Participants (n = 97) were majority male (59%), with a mean age of 48 (SD = 12), 27% had college education or higher, 64% indicated injection drug use, and 84% reported past naloxone training. All participants endorsed familiarity with naloxone, but only 42% regularly carried naloxone. The following variables were associated with carrying naloxone: White race (aOR = 2.94, 95% CI 1.02–8.52), college education (aOR = 8.11, 95% CI 1.76–37.47), and total number of self-reported harm reduction behaviors (aOR = 1.45, 95% CI 1.00–2.11). We found low rates of naloxone carriage among methadone-treated patients. Methadone programs provide opportunities for naloxone interventions and should target racial/ethnic minorities and individuals with lower education. The spectrum of harm reduction behaviors should be encouraged among these populations to enhance naloxone carriage.https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-023-00745-

High school drinking mediates the relationship between parental monitoring and college drinking: A longitudinal analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>College drinking is a significant public health problem. Although parental monitoring and supervision reduces the risk for alcohol consumption among younger adolescents, few studies have investigated the impact of earlier parental monitoring on later college drinking. This study examined whether parental monitoring indirectly exerts a protective effect on college drinking by reducing high school alcohol consumption.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A longitudinal cohort of 1,253 male and female students, ages 17 to 19, attending a large, public, mid-Atlantic university was studied at two time points. First, data on high school parental monitoring and alcohol consumption were gathered via questionnaire during the summer prior to college entry. Second, during the first year of college, past-year alcohol consumption was measured via a personal interview. Multiple regression models tested the relationship between parental monitoring and past year alcohol use (i.e., number of drinks per drinking day).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Holding constant demographics, SAT score, and religiosity, parental monitoring had a significant protective effect on both high school and college drinking level. However, the association between parental monitoring and college drinking level became non-significant once high school drinking level was held constant.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>While parental monitoring did not directly influence college alcohol consumption, evidence for mediation was observed, whereby parental monitoring had an indirect influence on college drinking through reductions in high school drinking. Initiatives that promote effective parenting might be an important strategy to curb high-risk drinking among older adolescents. More research is needed to understand the nature and degree of parent-child communication that is necessary to extend the protective influence of parents into the college years.</p

Introducing the National Drug Early Warning System.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: In 2013, NIH NIDA released a special funding opportunity to update and expand their longstanding Community Epidemiology Workgroup (CEWG) by creating a coordinating center for a new type of monitoring system that became the National Drug Early Warning System (NDEWS). This article provides an overview of four primary NDEWS components: core staff; an approach to detecting and monitoring emerging drug trends including community-based epidemiologists and national databases; small rapid follow-up studies; and innovative multimedia approaches for disseminating information. RECENT FINDINGS: The cornerstones for detecting and monitoring are the 1700+ member NDEWS Network and a coalition of local epidemiologists. Follow-up studies are designed with local researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to focus on local trends. Among NDEWS accomplishments are developing protocols for expanded urinalyses in high-risk populations and conducting follow-up studies with local collaborators in New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and a tribal nation in Minnesota. SUMMARY: During its first 6 years, NDEWS has advanced its mission to develop multidisciplinary collaborations and innovative technologies for identifying, monitoring, and following up on emerging drug trends and has contributed to the translation of science into practice

Choosing your platform for social media drug research and improving your keyword filter list

Social media research often has two things in common: Twitter is the platform used and a keyword filter list is used to extract only relevant Tweets. Here we propose that (a) alternative platforms be considered more often when doing social media research, and (b) regardless of platform, researchers use word embeddings as a type of synonym discovery to improve their keyword filter list, both of which lead to more relevant data. We demonstrate the benefit of these proposals by comparing how successful our synonym discovery method is at finding terms for marijuana and select opioids on Twitter versus a platform that can be filtered by topic, Reddit. We also find words that are not on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) drug slang list for that year, some of which appear on the list the subsequent year, showing that this method could be employed to find drug terms faster than traditional means.Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U01DA038360 awarded to the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) at the University of Maryland, College Park

ESTIMATING THE NEED FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT IN MARYLAND: AN UPDATE OF REUTER ET AL. (1998)

ABSTRACT 3 As in the modeling report by additional Maryland residents that we estimate are currently in need of AOD treatment is probably due to the large number of residents in Region 2 (DC Metro) and Region 6 (Central Maryland) that need treatment, who were not accounted for in the earlier study. 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENT