Improving Our Understanding of Substance Use Disorders

Technological aids for improving longitudinal research on substance use disorders

BACKGROUND There is a broad consensus that addictive behaviors tend to be chronic and relapsing. But for field studies of substance users, successfully tracking, locating, and following up with a representative sample of subjects is a challenge. METHODS The purpose of this paper is to provide a general overview of how current technological aids can support and improve the quality of longitudi...

Improving our understanding of youth suicide clusters.

The study by Madelyn S Gould and colleagues 1 reported in The Lancet Psychiatry provides strong evidence to suggest that media reporting about suicide in the days after the suicide of a young person might have a ripple eff ect within a community, and be a factor in subsequent suicides that constitute a cluster. Gould and colleagues did a sophisticated case-control study that showed signifi cant...

Improving our understanding of posttraumatic trajectories.

Improving our Understanding of Tropical Cyclone Genesis

The primary question to be addressed is to understand the mesoscale and microphysical differences between cloud clusters that do develop into tropical cyclones and those that do not. Because the problem is not just an issue of the differences of structure within the cloud cluster itself, but is also an issue of how the cloud cluster interacts with the surrounding large-scale environment, a two-...

Increasing our understanding of pigmentary disorders.

This article focuses on developments in pigmentary disorders that extend dermatologists' understanding of the field. Areas that are reviewed include the basic biochemistry, pharmacology, and physiology of the melanocortin system; melanosome development; genetic diseases associated with pigmentary disorders; pigmentary disorders secondary to systemic disease; drug-induced hyperpigmentation; envi...