2016

PURPOSE: Outpatient commitment orders are being increasingly used in many countries to ensure follow-up care of people with psychotic disorders after discharge from hospital. Several studies have examined outpatient commitment in relation to use of health care services, but there have been fewer studies of health professionals' experiences with the scheme. The purpose of this study was to examine health professionals' experiences with patients subject to outpatient commitment.

Background: Estimations of drug use are mostly based on population surveys that can suffer from response biases. The current study evaluates using wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) for assessing illicit drug use by comparing wastewater data with that from a population survey.

Background: Wastewater-based epidemiology is a novel approach in drug use epidemiology, which may provide more objective estimates of illicit drug use in a community. Functional data analysis (FDA) is a statistical framework specifically developed for analysing curves. We applied FDA to study weekly temporal patterns in wastewater curves for six different drugs in Italy.

Background: Benzodiazepines are frequently prescribed to patients with drug use disorders. However, it has previously been difficult to distinguish whether this frequent prescribing was due to underlying psychiatric disorders or inappropriate prescribing. In a nationwide cohort study, we investigated the prescribing of benzodiazepines to patients with drug use disorders in connection with treatment admission.

BACKGROUND: A good therapeutic relationship is a strong predictor of successful treatment in addiction and other psychological illness. Recent studies of horse-assisted therapy (HAT) have drawn attention to the importance of the client's relationship to the horse in psychotherapy. Few have reported on the patient's own perspective and none have reported specifically on the human-horse relationship in substance use disorder (SUD) treatment and its implications for health and well-being.

BACKGROUND: Polypharmacy is common among older persons who are also vulnerable to side effects. We aimed to characterize patients who on admission to a geriatric psychiatric hospital had major medication side effects interfering with daily performance.

Background: Current guidelines for opioid dependence recommend daily maintenance of physical dependence with methadone or buprenorphine, and discourage abstinence due to the high risk of relapse and overdose. Extended-release formulations of the opioid antagonist naltrexone (XR-NTX) block heroin and other opioid agonists competitively for around 4 weeks per administration. XR-NTX thus enables opioid users to experience abstinence from opioid agonists with greatly reduced risk of overdose compared to medication-free abstinence. While XR-NTX has shown promise compared to placebo and daily naltrexone tablets, there is limited information on long-term safety and its performance compared to daily maintenance treatment.

Clonazepam, nitrazepam and flunitrazepam are frequently used benzodiazepines, both as prescribed medication and as drugs of abuse. Little is, however, known about how these drugs are excreted in oral fluid. It has been claimed that the parent drugs are more likely to be detected in oral fluid than the 7-amino metabolites.

Legislative limits for driving under the influence of 20 non-alcohol drugs were introduced in Norway in February 2012.

Reduksjon av tvangsbruk i psykisk helsevern har siden 2006 vært et helsepolitisk mål. Det er store forskjeller i antall tvangsinnleggelser mellom de ulike helseforetakene, og datagrunnlaget som beskriver bruk av tvangsinnleggelser i Norge er mangelfullt. Vi ønsker å påpeke en rekke faktorer som vi mener må være til stede for å redusere antall tvangsinnleggelser.

Background: Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is more successful in reducing hospitalization when baseline use is high. However, with a growing recovery-focus, ACT may be useful for people with severe mental illness who are difficult to engage but not high users of inpatient services. This study investigated hospitalization 2 years before and 2 years after ACT enrollment amongst patients both with and without high inpatient services use before enrollment into ACT.

Background/aims: Alcohol and nicotine are the two most used substances world-wide and associated with increased burden of disease. Since surveys on substance use may be difficult due to response biases, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) was developed as a more objective measure of nicotine and alcohol use. This study compares estimates of nicotine and alcohol use from a wastewater sampling campaign in a medium-sized Belgian city with a concurrently executed population survey.

BACKGROUND: Quality of life (QoL) is an important measure and outcome within chronic disease management and treatment, including substance use disorders (SUD). The aim of this paper was to investigate correlates of poorer QoL of individuals entering SUD treatment in Norway, in order to identify subgroups that may most benefit from different interventions.

PURPOSE: Patients with a substance use disorder (SUD), admitted for detoxification, often suffer from a poor quality of life (QoL). We set out to monitor QoL, together with substance use, in a departure from the usual norm of measuring substance use alone as a treatment outcome. Literature searches revealed scant knowledge of how QoL is influenced. With this in mind, we aimed to investigate whether total abstinence, prior to follow-up, could influence QoL.

BACKGROUND: Time-trend studies on psychotropic drugs among children and adolescents are scarce, and most of them are outdated. The purpose of this study was to study prevalences of psychotropic drug use during 2004-2014 among Norwegians aged <18 years, overall and in psychotropic sub-groups.

BACKGROUND: Prescription databases provide the opportunity for investigating opioid treatment and co-medication within large populations. So far, few studies have investigated the duration of opioid therapy, and large differences in discontinuation rates have been reported.

BACKGROUND: Generic quality of life (QoL) instruments provide important measures of self-reported wellbeing that can be compared across healthy and clinical populations. The aim of this analysis is to validate the ten-item QoL instrument "QOL10", as well as to confirm the validity of the embedded "QOL5" questionnaire and single-item "QOL1" in measuring overall QoL among adults in a substance use disorder treatment study.

Formålet med denne artikel er at undersøge, beskrive og udvikle kundskab om de erfaringer, som pårørende oplever i tiden op til, under og efter et akut narkotikarelateret dødsfald, og på denne baggrund bidrage til en videre diskussion af, hvordan det professionelle hjælpeapparat bedre kan imødekomme deres behov.