Browsing by Subject "Alcohol-Related Disorders"

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    Evaluating brief screeners to discriminate between drug use disorders in a sample of treatment-seeking adults.
    (General hospital psychiatry, 2013-01) Wu, Li-Tzy; Swartz, Marvin S; Pan, Jeng-Jong; Burchett, Bruce; Mannelli, Paolo; Yang, Chongming; Blazer, Dan G
    OBJECTIVE:The objective was to identify a potential core set of brief screeners for the detection of individuals with a substance use disorder (SUD) in medical settings. METHOD:Data were from two multisite studies that evaluated stimulant use outcomes of an abstinence-based contingency management intervention as an addition to usual care (National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network trials 006-007). The sample comprised 847 substance-using adults who were recruited from 12 outpatient substance abuse treatment settings across the United States. Alcohol and drug use disorders were assessed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Checklist. Data were analyzed by factor analysis, item response theory (IRT), sensitivity and specificity procedures. RESULTS:Comparatively prevalent symptoms of dependence, especially inability to cut down for all substances, showed high sensitivity for detecting an SUD (low rate of false negative). IRT-defined severe (infrequent) and low discriminative items, especially withdrawal for alcohol, cannabis and cocaine, had low sensitivity in identifying cases of an SUD. IRT-defined less severe (frequent) and high discriminative items, including inability to cut down or taking larger amounts than intended for all substances and withdrawal for amphetamines and opioids, showed good-to-high values of area under the receiver operating characteristic curve in classifying cases and noncases of an SUD. CONCLUSION:Findings suggest the feasibility of identifying psychometrically reliable substance dependence symptoms to develop a two-item screen for alcohol and drug disorders.
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    Tobacco smoking and other suspected antecedents of nonmedical psychostimulant use in the United States, 1995.
    (Substance use & misuse, 1999-07) Wu, LT; Anthony, JC
    This study investigates the extent to which tobacco smoking is associated with the nonmedical use of psychostimulants and the temporal order of the age of first use for tobacco and psychostimulants within a nationally representative sample of United States household residents. At the same time, alcohol use and other suspected determinants of psychostimulant use are investigated and held constant, using multiple regression models. Data were taken from public use files of the 1995 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Conditional logistic regression analyses were performed to derive estimated relative odds of using stimulants for tobacco smokers versus nonsmokers, holding constant other potentially distorting influences. This study provides recent evidence on tobacco smoking as one of the potentially malleable risk factors for the nonmedical use of stimulant drugs.