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"While all adolescents can improve when they receive well-articulated substance-use disorder treatment, we showed that adding a 12-step component to standard cognitive-behavioral and motivational strategies produced significantly greater reductions in substance-related consequences during and in the months following treatment," says John Kelly, PhD, director of the Recovery Research Institute in the MGH Department of Psychiatry, who led the study. "It also produced higher rates of 12-step meeting participation, which was associated with longer periods of continuous abstinence." While it is common for adolescent treatment programs in the U.S. to link patients to mutual-help organizations like AA, Narcotics Anonymous (NA) or Marijuana Anonymous (MA), the effectiveness of combining 12-step approaches with motivational enhancement/cognitive-behavioral therapies has not been clear because there has been no well-defined treatment protocol integrating both approaches...

The annual rate of people who quit smoking has hovered around 4.5 percent for years but in the 2014-15 Current Population Survey-Tobacco Use Supplement (CPS-TUS) survey the smoking cessation rate increased to 5.6. The 1.1 percentage point increase is statistically significant, representing approximately 350,000 additional smokers who quit in a 12-month period. Shu-Hong Zhu, PhD, UC San Diego professor of Family Medicine and Public Health and director of the Center for Research and Intervention in Tobacco Control, and team published their findings in the British Medical Journal on July 26, 2017. Zhu attributes the increased cessation rate, in part, to national tobacco control media campaigns that began airing in 2012 and an increase in the popularity of e-cigarettes that spiked around 2014. "Our analysis of the population survey data indicated that smokers who also used e-cigarettes were more likely to attempt to quit smoking, and more likely to succeed," said Zhu. ...

After years of accelerating charges of binge ingesting, alcohol-impaired driving , and alcohol-related mortality amongst rising adults ages 18 to 24, the numbers are lastly beginning to come down amongst school college students in that age group, based on a examine within the July challenge of the  Journal of Research on Alcohol and Medication . Nevertheless, those self same numbers are on the rise in younger adults of the identical age who should not in school. The identical examine discovered that alcohol-related overdose hospitalizations and overdose deaths have elevated amongst 18- to 24-year-olds as a complete. Analysis for this examine started in 1998, when the Nationwide Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) convened a activity drive to look at issues associated to school ingesting and to determine doable options, based on examine creator and activity drive member Ralph Hingson, SC.D., M.P.H., of the Division of Epidemiology and Prevent...

Wine. Credit score: © stokkete / Fotolia Older adults who eat alcohol reasonably regularly usually tend to stay to the age of 85 with out dementia or different cognitive impairments than non-drinkers, in line with a College of California San Diego Faculty of Drugs-led examine. The findings are revealed within the August challenge of the  Journal of Alzheimer's Illness . Earlier research have discovered a correlation between reasonable alcohol consumption and longevity. "This examine is exclusive as a result of we thought-about women and men's cognitive well being at late age and located that alcohol consumption shouldn't be solely related to diminished mortality, however with larger probabilities of remaining cognitively wholesome into older age," mentioned senior writer Linda McEvoy, PhD, an affiliate professor at UC San Diego Faculty of Drugs. Particularly, the researchers discovered that amongst women and men 85 and older,...

Psychologists examined responses in a survey of more than 3,000* men on a variety of life factors, and found that just over a quarter who had probable pathological gambling problems had witnessed violence in the home as a child. Ten per cent also reported being physically abused in childhood, and a further seven per cent said they had suffered a life-threatening injury. Problem gamblers -- those who have not yet escalated to a pathological problem, but are deemed to have a more serious addiction than non-problem gamblers -- also reported higher rates of childhood trauma, with just under 23 per cent saying they had witnessed violence at home, and nine per cent experiencing physical abuse. In comparison, just eight per cent of non-problem gamblers witnessed domestic violence when they were a child, and less than four per cent had suffered abuse. The study, led by the University of Lincoln, UK, also found that 35 per cent of pathological gamblers had suffered serious money problems...

Drug withdrawal is a well known complication of opioid exposure in the womb (in utero), but other psychotropic medications can also cause signs of withdrawal -- and are increasingly being prescribed to pregnant women who are also receiving an opioid. So a team of US researchers based at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, set out to assess the impact of in utero exposure to both psychotropic medications and opioids on number of cases and severity of neonatal drug withdrawal. They analysed data from over 200,000 pregnant women who were enrolled in the Medicaid program -- a US government program that pays for healthcare services -- and who received a prescription for an opioid. They then examined whether the risk of neonatal abstinence syndrome was increased among infants whose mothers were also prescribed psychotropic medication. After taking account of several factors that could have affected the results (known as confounders), the absolute risk for...