Influence of Parental Attitudes Towards Internet Use on the Employment of Online Safety Measures at Home.

Influence of parental attitudes towards internet use on the employment of online safety measures at home.

Filed under: Addiction Rehab

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2012; 181: 64-70
Floros G, Siomos K, Dafouli E, Fisoun V, Geroukalis D

In this paper we present the results of a cross-sectional study of the entire adolescent student population aged 12-18 of the island of Kos and their parents, on Internet safety-related practices and attitudes towards the Internet. Total sample was 2017 students and 1214 parent responders. Research material included extended demographics and an Internet security questionnaire, the Internet Attitudes Scale (IAS) for parents and the Adolescent Computer Addiction Test (ACAT) for children and both parents. Both parents thus provided their views on their children’s computer use and an estimate for their degree of computer addiction which was tested against their child’s self-report. Results indicated that fathers and mothers who had negative views of the Internet, tended to encourage less their children to engage in online activities and worried more for the possibility that their child is addicted to computer use; their worries weren’t correlated with their children’s results. Parental views on the Internet had no effect on the level of security precautions they employed at home. Those parents who reported a low level of security knowledge and were unsure as to what their children were doing online, tended to consider their children more likely to be addicted to computer use; those views were confirmed by their children’ self-reported results.
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Childhood sexual abuse and risk for initiating injection drug use: A prospective cohort study.

Filed under: Addiction Rehab

Prev Med. 2012 Aug 28;
Hadland SE, Werb D, Kerr T, Fu E, Wang H, Montaner JS, Wood E

OBJECTIVE: This study examined whether childhood sexual abuse predicts initiation of injection drug use in a prospective cohort of youth. METHOD: From October 2005 to November 2010, data were collected from the At Risk Youth Study (ARYS), a prospective cohort study of street-involved youth in Vancouver, Canada. Inclusion criteria were age 14-26years, no lifetime drug injection, and non-injection drug use in the month preceding enrollment. Participants were interviewed at baseline and semiannually thereafter. Cox regression was employed to identify risk factors for initiating injection. RESULTS: Among 395 injection-naïve youth, 81 (20.5%) reported childhood sexual abuse. During a median follow-up of 15.9months (total follow-up 606.6 person-years), 45 (11.4%) youth initiated injection drug use, resulting in an incidence density of 7.4 per 100 person-years. In univariate analyses, childhood sexual abuse was associated with increased risk of initiating injection (unadjusted hazard ratio [HR], 2.38; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.29-4.38; p=0.006), an effect that persisted in multivariate analysis despite adjustment for gender, age, aboriginal ancestry and recent non-injection drug use (adjusted HR, 2.71; 95% CI, 1.42-5.20; p=0.003). CONCLUSION: Childhood sexual abuse places drug users at risk for initiating injection. Addiction treatment programs should incorporate services for survivors of childhood maltreatment.
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Comparison of two internet-based interventions for problem drinkers: randomized controlled trial.

Filed under: Addiction Rehab

J Med Internet Res. 2012; 14(4): e107
Cunningham JA

Alcohol problems are a serious public health concern, and few problem drinkers ever seek treatment. The Internet is one means of promoting access to care, but more research is needed to test the best types of interventions to employ. Evaluation of Internet-based interventions that contain a variety of research-validated cognitive-behavioral tools, which have been shown to be helpful to those with more severe alcohol concerns, should be a priority.To evaluate whether providing access to an extended Internet intervention for alcohol problems offers additional benefits in promoting reductions in alcohol consumption compared with a brief Internet intervention. The hypothesis for the current trial was that respondents who were provided with access to an extended Internet intervention (the Alcohol Help Center [AHC]) would display significantly improved drinking outcomes at 6-month follow-up, compared with respondents who were provided with access to a brief Internet intervention (the Check Your Drinking [CYD] screener).A single-blinded randomized controlled trial with a 6-month follow-up. A general population sample of problem drinkers was recruited through newspaper advertisements in a large metropolitan city. Baseline and follow-up data were collected by postal mail.A volunteer sample of problem drinkers of legal drinking age with home access to the Internet were recruited for the trial. Of 239 potential respondents recruited in 2010, 170 met inclusion criteria (average age 45 years; 101/170, 59.4% male; average Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test [AUDIT] score of 22). Follow-up rates were 90.0% (153/170) with no adverse effects of the interventions reported. A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance of the outcome measures using an intent-to-treat approach found a significantly greater reduction in amount of drinking among participants provided access to the AHC than among participants provided access to the CYD (P = .046).The provision of the AHC gave additional benefit in the short term to problem drinkers over that seen from the research-validated CYD, indicating the benefits of promoting access to these interventions as one means of helping people with problem drinking concerns.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01114919; http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01114919 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/68t1dCkRZ).
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Development of multi-route physiologically-based pharmacokinetic models for ethanol in the adult, pregnant, and neonatal rat.

Filed under: Addiction Rehab

Inhal Toxicol. 2012 Sep; 24(11): 698-722
Martin SA, McLanahan ED, El-Masri H, Lefew WR, Bushnell PJ, Boyes WK, Choi K, Clewell HJ, Campbell JL

Biofuel blends of 10% ethanol (EtOH) and gasoline are common in the USA, and higher EtOH concentrations are being considered (15-85%). Currently, no physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models are available to describe the kinetics of EtOH-based biofuels. PBPK models were developed to describe life-stage differences in the kinetics of EtOH alone in adult, pregnant, and neonatal rats for inhalation, oral, and intravenous routes of exposure, using data available in the open literature. Whereas ample data exist from gavage and intravenous routes of exposure, kinetic data from inhalation exposures are limited, particularly at concentrations producing blood and target tissue concentrations associated with developmental neurotoxicity. Compared to available data, the three models reported in this paper accurately predicted the kinetics of EtOH, including the absorption, peak concentration, and clearance across multiple datasets. In general, model predictions for adult and pregnant animals matched inhalation and intravenous datasets better than gavage data. The adult model was initially better able to predict the time-course of blood concentrations than was the neonatal model. However, after accounting for age-related changes in gastric uptake using the calibrated neonate model, simulations consistently reproduced the early kinetic behavior in blood. This work provides comprehensive multi-route life-stage models of EtOH pharmacokinetics and represents a first step in development of models for use with gasoline-EtOH blends, with additional potential applicability in investigation of the pharmacokinetics of EtOH abuse, addiction, and toxicity.
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