Use and Misuse of Opioids in Chronic Pain.

The prescribing of opioid analgesics for pain management-particularly for management of chronic noncancer pain (CNCP)-has increased more than fourfold in the United States since the mid-1990s. Yet there is mounting evidence that opioids have only limited effectiveness in the management of CNCP, and the increased availability of prescribed opioids has contributed to upsurges in opioid-related addiction cases and overdose deaths. These concerns have led to critical revisiting and modification of prior pain management practices (e.g., guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), but the much-needed changes in clinical practice will be facilitated by a better understanding of the pharmacology and behavioral effects of opioids that underlie both their therapeutic effects (analgesia) and their adverse effects (addiction and overdose). With these goals in mind, this review first presents an overview of the contemporary problems associated with opioid management of CNCP and the related public health issues of opioid diversion, overdose, and addiction. It then discusses the pharmacology underlying the therapeutic and main adverse effects of opioids and its implications for clinical management of CNCP within the framework of recent clinical guidelines for prescribing opioids in the management of CNCP.

Substance Misuse and Substance use Disorders: Why do they Matter in Healthcare?

This paper first introduces important conceptual and practical distinctions among three key terms: substance "use," "misuse," and "disorders" (including addiction), and goes on to describe and quantify the important health and social problems associated with these terms. National survey data are presented to summarize the prevalence and varied costs associated with misuse of alcohol, illegal drugs, and prescribed medications in the United States. With this as background, the paper then describes historical views, perspectives, and efforts to deal with substance misuse problems in the United States and discusses how basic, clinical, and health service research, combined with recent changes in healthcare legislation and financing, have set the stage for a more effective, comprehensive public health approach.

Use of the Internet to Obtain Drugs without a Prescription Among Treatment-involved Adolescents and Young Adults.

Nonmedical use of prescription drugs is common and poses risks such as injury, overdose, and development of abuse and dependence. Internet pharmacies offer prescription drugs without a prescription, creating a source of illicit drugs accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. We examined this issue in a convenience sample of 1,860 adolescents and young adults from 24 residential and outpatient treatment programs. Few individuals obtained drugs from the Internet (n = 26, 2.3%). Pain relievers were the most frequently purchased type of drug. The majority of adolescents and young adult online purchasers made the purchases from their own or a friend's house.

Assessing Adolescent Substance Abuse Programs with Updated Quality Indicators: The Development of a Consumer Guide for Adolescent Treatment.

When adolescent substance abuse requires treatment, few parents know which treatment features are important and which treatment programs are effective. There are few resources to help them select appropriate care. We describe early work on an evaluation method and comparative treatment guide for parents based upon the premise that the quality of a program and its potential effectiveness is a function of the number and frequency of evidence-based treatment practices (EBPs) delivered. Thus, we describe the development of and measurement approach for a set of EBPs toward the goal of developing a Consumer Guide to Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment.

Demonstration of an app-delivered digital therapeutic program for methamphetamine use disorder.

This study assessed the feasibility and utility of a digital, all-virtual program designed for treatment of methamphetamine use disorder (MUD). Forty-nine adults with moderate- to severe-level MUD (per DSM-5 criteria) commenced the 8-week intervention. All aspects of the program were delivered via smartphone-based app. Intervention components included counseling (cognitive behavioral therapy in group and individual sessions), app-based therapeutic tasks, remote biological drug testing, medical oversight by psychiatrists/nurse practitioners, and contingency management procedures (including rewards for methamphetamine-free saliva drug tests, accomplishing tasks, and engaging in assigned activities). Of the 49 participants who commenced treatment, 27 participants (55%) completed the program. Repeated-measures mixed-model analyses show that participants were more likely to test negative for meth use from week 1 to week 8 (OR = 1.57, 95% CI [1.28, 1.97]; p = 0.034). Well-being and social functioning improved among the majority of participants. These results demonstrate the utility of the all-virtual, digital therapeutic program and its ability to help individuals with MUD to reduce or cease methamphetamine use. The program was efficiently implemented and was well received by participants and clinical personnel, indicating its ability to deliver comprehensive, effective care and to retain the difficult-to-engage population of persons with MUD. Of the 27 completers, 16 responded to a 1-month follow-up survey and reported no meth use in the month since completing the program.

Integrating addiction medicine into graduate medical education in primary care: the time has come.

Substance use disorders create an enormous burden of medical, behavioral, and social problems and pose a major and costly public health challenge. Despite the high prevalence of substance use and its consequences, physicians often do not recognize these conditions and, as a result, provide inadequate patient care. At the center of this failure is insufficient training for physicians about substance use disorders. To address this deficit, the Betty Ford Institute convened a meeting of experts who developed the following 5 recommendations focused on improving training in substance abuse in primary care residency programs in internal medicine and family medicine: 1) integrating substance abuse competencies into training, 2) assigning substance abuse teaching the same priority as teaching about other chronic diseases, 3) enhancing faculty development, 4) creating addiction medicine divisions or programs in academic medical centers, and 5) making substance abuse screening and management routine care in new models of primary care practice. This enhanced primary care residency training should represent a major step forward in improving patient care.

Evolution of concept, but not action, in addiction treatment.

The Western approach to addiction treatment involves a medical or disease orientation to understanding the onset, course, and management of addiction, and a clinical goal of abstinence or very significant reductions in drug use, usually with a combination of behavioral and pharmacological interventions. Even within this Western approach, and despite several consensually accepted features of addiction, a significant mismatch remains between what this culture has come to accept as the nature of the disease and how that same culture continues to treat the disease. This paper discusses the evolution of these Western concepts over the past decade without a corresponding evolution in the nature, duration, or evaluation standards for addiction treatment. (1) Here, we take the position that continuing care and adaptive treatment protocols, combining behavioral therapies, family and social supports, and, where needed, medications show much promise to address the typically chronic, relapsing, and heterogeneous nature of most cases of serious addiction. By extension, methods to evaluate effectiveness of addiction treatment should focus upon the functional status of patients during the course of their treatment instead of post-treatment, as is the evaluation practice used with most other chronic illnesses.

Penn/VA center for studies of addiction.

The Penn/VA Center was founded in 1971 because of great concern over the number of Vietnam veterans returning home addicted to heroin. At that time little was known about the science of addiction, so our program from the very beginning was designed to gather data about the nature of addiction and measure the effects of available treatments. In other words, the goals were always a combination of treatment and research. This combination has continued to the present day. A human laboratory for the study of addiction phenomena such as conditioned responses was also founded in 1971. The key clinician investigators in this group have remained in the Center since the 1970s with most of the research staff continuing to work together. Important new investigators have been added over the years. Treatment was empirically based with randomized, controlled clinical trials as the gold standard for determining evidence-based treatment. The patients coming to treatment do not distinguish between abuse of alcohol and other drugs, so the treatment and research programs have always focused on all drugs including ethyl alcohol and the combination of ethyl alcohol with other drugs such as cocaine and opioids. Most of the patients coming for treatment also suffered from additional psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Thus, the addiction treatment program in 1980 absorbed the rest of the VA Psychiatry Service into the Substance Abuse Program forming a new Behavioral Health Service with responsibility for over 9000 patients. The integration of substance abuse treatment with overall mental health care was the most efficient way to handle patients with complicated combinations of disorders. While this continues to be the best way to treat patients, it has proven difficult in practice. The main reason for this difficulty is that most mental health therapists whether they are psychiatrists, psychologists or social workers feel very inadequate to handle substance abuse problems. Unless they have had specialized training in addictive disorders, therapists are likely to be uncomfortable if substance abuse is one of the diagnoses while they may be quite comfortable treating other complex disorders such as schizophrenia. This lack of education of clinicians remains a major problem for our field. Some of the findings that came out of both the Penn/VA laboratory and clinical studies are now widely accepted and form the basis of standard clinical practice. These concepts and evidence will be briefly reviewed below.

Methodological challenges and limitations of research on alcohol consumption and effect on common clinical conditions: evidence from six systematic reviews.

BACKGROUND: Despite the high prevalence of alcohol consumption in the US, 'mainstream' physicians generally consider it to be peripheral to most patient care. This may be due in part to a dearth of rigorous research on alcohol's effect on common diseases. METHODS: To evaluate this issue, we examined six systematic reviews, four of which were conducted as part of a research initiative supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Program of Research to Integrate Substance Use Information into Mainstream Healthcare (PRISM). PRISM aimed to assimilate and improve the evidence on the medical impact of alcohol (and other drugs of abuse) on common chronic conditions. RESULTS: From these reviews, we summarize the methodological limitations of research on alcohol's impact on development and/or clinical course of depression, hypertension, diabetes, bone disease, dementia, and sexually transmitted diseases. The studies included in these reviews were largely fair to good quality, and few were in primary care settings. Syntheses were hampered by the myriad of definitions of alcohol consumption from any/none to seven levels and a plethora of types of alcohol use disorders. CONCLUSION: We recommend more high-quality observational and experimental studies in primary care settings as well as a more standard approach to quantifying alcohol use and to defining alcohol use disorders.

Evidence for substance abuse services and policy research: a systematic review of national databases.

We reviewed 39 national government- and nongovernment-sponsored data sets related to substance addiction policy. These data sets describe patients with substance use disorders (SUDs), treatment providers and the services they offer, and/or expenditures on treatment. Findings indicate the availability of reliable data on the prevalence of SUD and the characteristics of specialty treatment facilities, but meager data on financing and services. Gaps in information might be filled through agency collaboration to redesign, coordinate, and augment existing substance abuse and general health surveys. Despite noted gaps, these data sets represent an unusually rich set of resources for health services and policy research.

Initial reliability and validity studies of the revised Treatment Services Review (TSR-6).

OBJECTIVE: Report the results of initial reliability and validity analyses for a revised Treatment Services Review (TSR-6) instrument which measures a broader range of services than the original TSR. METHOD: First, the number of services for a 28-day period was compared for three versions of the instrument varying in their reporting timeframes. Accordingly, four successive 7-day TSR-6s, two 14-day TSR-6s, or one 28-day TSR-6 were administered to more than 300 clients (30% women) in substance abuse treatment (SAT). Second, short-term (2-5 days) test-retest reliabilities were compared for an initial 7-, 14-, or 28-day version of the TSR-6. Third, test-retest reliabilities were compared when an initial in-person (IP) administration was followed by either IP or telephone (TEL) TSR-6 administration. Finally, preliminary discriminative validity analyses were conducted. RESULTS: Few differences in the quantity of services reported for a 4-week period were found with versions of the TSR-6 that used different timeframes. Also, comparisons of test-retest reliabilities for the different version of the TSR-6 revealed few differences. Test-retest reliabilities were generally comparable for the IP-TEL and IP-IP conditions. Finally, analyses demonstrated preliminary discriminative validity for the instrument when services for three distinctive forms of treatment: intensive outpatient, methadone and residential were compared. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study support the reliability and validity of the TSR-6 and suggest that a version with a 28-day reporting period can provide information comparable to that obtained with versions using shorter reporting periods.

Extending residential care through telephone counseling: initial results from the Betty Ford Center Focused Continuing Care protocol.

There is increasing evidence that a chronic care model may be effective when treating substance use disorders. In 1996, the Betty Ford Center (BFC) began implementing a telephone-based continuing care intervention now called Focused Continuing Care (FCC) to assist and support patients in their transition from residential treatment to longer-term recovery in the "real world". This article reports on patient utilization and outcomes of FCC. FCC staff placed clinically directed telephone calls to patients (N=4094) throughout the first year after discharge. During each call, a short survey was administered to gauge patient recovery and guide the session. Patients completed an average of 5.5 (40%) of 14 scheduled calls, 58% completed 5 or more calls, and 85% were participating in FCC two months post-discharge or later. There was preliminary evidence that greater participation in FCC yielded more positive outcomes and that early post-discharge behaviors predict subsequent outcomes. FCC appears to be a feasible therapeutic option. Efforts to revise FCC to enhance its clinical and administrative value are described.

Improving public addiction treatment through performance contracting: the Delaware experiment.

In fiscal 2002, Delaware replaced traditional cost-reimbursement contracts with performance-based contracts for all outpatient addiction treatment programs. Incentives included 90% capacity utilization and active patient participation in treatment. One of the programs failed to meet requirements. Strategies adopted by successful programs included extended hours of operation, facility enhancements, salary incentives for counselors, and two evidence-based therapies (MI and CBT). Average capacity utilization from 2001 to 2006 went from 54% to 95%; and the average proportion of patients' meeting participation requirements went from 53% to 70%--with no notable changes in the patient population. We conclude that properly designed, program-based contract incentives are feasible to apply, welcomed by programs and may help set the financial conditions necessary to implement other evidence-based clinical efforts; toward the overall goal of improving addiction treatment.

Prescription OxyContin abuse among patients entering addiction treatment.

OBJECTIVE: OxyContin and other pharmaceutical opioids have been given special attention in the media, who frequently describe problematic users of the drug as previously drug-naive individuals who become addicted following legitimate prescriptions for medical reasons. The purpose of this study was to characterize the nature and origins of pharmaceutical opioid addiction among patients presenting at substance abuse treatment programs. METHOD: The authors evaluated the prevalence and correlates of OxyContin use and abuse among a population of 27,816 subjects admitted to 157 addiction treatment programs in the United States from 2001-2004. The data collected included the lifetime and past 30-day use of OxyContin and other drugs prior to admission to addiction treatment, source of drug supply, and prior treatment history. RESULTS: Approximately 5% of all subjects who were admitted to the 157 addiction treatment programs reported prior use of OxyContin. Of those subjects, 4.5% reported using the drug on a regular basis for at least 1 year, and 2% reported use of the drug during the 30 days prior to admission. Seventy-eight percent of subjects who reported OxyContin use also reported that the drug had not been prescribed to them for any medical reason, 86% reported use of the drug to "get high or get a buzz," and 78% reported receiving prior treatment for a substance use disorder. CONCLUSIONS: The patients in this sample did not include individuals from private therapists or pain clinics. However, among treatment-seeking individuals who use OxyContin, the drug is most frequently obtained from nonmedical sources as part of a broader and longer-term pattern of multiple substance abuse.