Reducing Appointment No-Shows: Going From Theory to Practice.
Reducing Appointment No-Shows: Going from Theory to Practice.
Subst Use Misuse. 2013 Apr 22;
Molfenter T
Addiction appointment no-shows adversely impact clinical outcomes and healthcare productivity. During 2007-2010, 67 treatment organizations in the Strengthening Treatment Access and Retention program were asked to reduce their no-show rates by using practices taken from no-show research and theory. These treatment organizations reduced outpatient no-show rates from 37.4% to 19.9% (p = .000), demonstrated which practices they preferred to implement, and which practices were most effective in reducing no-show rates. This study provides an applied synthesis of addiction treatment no-show research and suggests future directions for no-show research and practice. HubMed – addiction
Psychological predictors of male smokeless tobacco use initiation and cessation: a 16-year longitudinal study.
Addiction. 2013 Apr 4;
Holman LR, Bricker JB, Comstock BA
AIMS: To test whether psychological factors predict male smokeless tobacco (SLT) initiation and cessation longitudinally. DESIGN: Sixteen-year longitudinal design with 95% retention at year 6 and 82% at year 16. SETTING: Forty Washington State school districts. PARTICIPANTS: SLT use data were gathered on a cohort of adolescents (91% Caucasian). For SLT initiation, the sample size was 2468. For SLT cessation, sample sizes were 219 (age 20 outcome) and 192 (age 28 outcome). MEASUREMENTS: Self-reported psychological measures of parental disobedience (‘parent non-compliance’), peer influence (‘friend compliance’), rebelliousness and thrill-seeking were taken at ages 12 and 18. SLT use was measured at ages 12, 18, 20 and 28 years. FINDINGS: For SLT initiation, scoring highly on the following psychological factors at age 12 at least doubled the odds of daily SLT use at age 18 (P?HubMed – addiction
Common biological networks underlie genetic risk for alcoholism in African- and European-American populations.
Genes Brain Behav. 2013 Apr 22;
Kos MZ, Yan J, Dick DM, Agrawal A, Bucholz KK, Rice JP, Johnson EO, Schuckit M, Kuperman S, Kramer J, Goate AM, Tischfield JA, Foroud T, Nurnberger J, Hesselbrock V, Porjesz B, Bierut LJ, Edenberg HJ, Almasy L
Alcohol dependence (AD) is a heritable substance addiction with adverse physical and psychological consequences, representing a major health and economic burden on societies worldwide. Genes thus far implicated via linkage, candidate gene and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) account for only a small fraction of its overall risk, with effects varying across ethnic groups. Here we investigate the genetic architecture of alcoholism and report on the extent to which common, genome-wide SNPs collectively account for risk of AD in two US populations, African-Americans (AAs) and European-Americans (EAs). Analyzing GWAS data for two independent case-control sample sets, we compute polymarker scores that are significantly associated with alcoholism (P=1.64?×?10(-3) and 2.08?×?10(-4) for EAs and AAs, respectively), reflecting the small individual effects of thousands of variants derived from patterns of allelic architecture that are population-specific. Simulations show that disease models based on rare and uncommon causal variants (MAF<0.05) best fit the observed distribution of polymarker signals. When scoring bins were annotated for gene location and examined for constituent biological networks, gene enrichment is observed for several cellular processes and functions in both EA and AA populations, transcending their underlying allelic differences. Our results reveal key insights into the complex etiology of AD, raising the possibility of an important role for rare and uncommon variants, and identify polygenic mechanisms that encompass a spectrum of disease liability, with some, such as chloride transporters and glycine metabolism genes, displaying subtle, modifying effects that are likely to escape detection in most GWAS designs. HubMed – addiction