AIMS To determine how alcohol use differentially affects brain functioning in male and female adolescents. METHODS Adolescents with alcohol use disorders (AUDs; 7 female, 11 male) and control adolescents without AUDs (9 female, 12 male), aged 14-17 years, performed spatial working memory and vigilance tasks during functional magnetic resonance imaging. RESULTS Gender, AUD and their interact...

Early age of onset alcohol drinking is significantly more likely to lead to alcohol use disorders (AUDs) than alcohol drinking that begins after the age of 18. Unfortunately, the majority of people in the United States begin drinking in adolescence. Therefore, it is important to understand how early alcohol drinking leads to increased risk for AUDs so that better treatments and prevention strat...

BACKGROUND Treatment of alcohol use disorders (AUDs) is characterized by an adherence rate below 50%. Clinical research has found that patient adherence enhances treatment effect; hence, health authorities, clinicians, and researchers strive to explore initiatives contributing to patients receiving treatment. Concurrently, videoconferencing-based treatment is gaining ground within other addicti...

BACKGROUND Although alcohol use disorders (AUDs) have enormous public health consequences, the rate of diagnosis of AUDs remains unsatisfactorily low. The primary aim of this study was to compare the detection of AUDs by anesthesiologists in a large preoperative assessment clinic to that by computerized self-assessment of the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test. Secondary outcome measures ...

OBJECTIVE To examine the differences between Prevalence Ratio (PR) and Odds Ratio (OR) in a cross-sectional study and to provide tools to calculate PR using two statistical packages widely used in substance use research (STATA and R). METHODS We used cross-sectional data from 41,263 participants of 16 European countries participating in the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (S...

AIMS To examine patterns of drinking in the UK Armed Forces, how they vary according to gender and other demographics, and to make comparisons with the general population. DESIGN Large cross-sectional postal questionnaire study (response rate 60%). SETTING United Kingdom. PARTICIPANTS A random representative sample of the regular UK Armed Forces who were in service in March 2003 (n = 8686...

Homelessness is associated with substance use, but whether substance use precedes or follows homelessness is unclear. We investigate the nature of the relationship between homelessness and substance use using data from the unique Australian panel dataset Journeys Home collected in 4 surveys over the period from October 2011 to May 2013. Our data refer to 1325 individuals who were homeless or at...

Almost 20 years ago research indicated that brief interventions1 in primary care settings helped patients with at-risk drinking and milder alcohol use disorder (AUD) reduce heavy drinking.2 More recent meta-analyses have overwhelmingly confirmed this finding.3,4 However, evidence showed that brief interventions were not effective in helping those with more severe AUD reduce or stop drinking.5 A...

OBJECTIVE Alcohol misuse is substantially influenced by social factors, but systematic assessments of social network drinking are typically lengthy. The goal of the present study was to provide further validation of a brief measure of social network alcohol use, the Brief Alcohol Social Density Assessment (BASDA), in a sample of emerging adults. Specifically, the study sought to examine the BAS...

We examine the impact of rearing by an alcoholic parent on risk for child behavior problems using data on 2492 offspring drawn from two ongoing studies of children of female and male same- and opposite-sex twin pairs. Results of regression models predicting child behavior problems from parent and co-twin lifetime history of alcohol use disorder (AUD) provide support for genetic but not environm...