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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...

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...