OBJECTIVE To estimate the degree of tobacco addiction and identify independently associated factors by comparing the psychiatric population of secondary and tertiary care with the general population of the primary healthcare network. METHOD This is a cross-sectional epidemiological study, conducted in a municipality of São Paulo, with 134 smokers of a Mental Health Outpatient Unit (MHOU), a P...

Aims: This study examined the association of alcohol use and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in a clinic population in South Africa. Methods: A probability sample of 1532 (56.4% men and women 43.6%) patients from different hospital outpatient departments completed the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test and the social functioning (SF)-12 Health Survey. Physical and Mental Health Com...

BACKGROUND Heroin-assisted treatment has been found to be effective for people with severe opioid dependence who are not interested in or do poorly on methadone maintenance. AIMS To study heroin-assisted treatment in people on methadone who continue intravenous heroin and in those who are heroin dependent but currently not in treatment. METHOD In an open-label multicentre randomised control...

UNLABELLED Admission to one of the state hospitals in West Virginia is gained through a legal proceeding which is initiated on a county level. It was hypothesized that involuntary psychiatric admission patterns from the Sharpe Hospital catchment area do not have a direct correlation with county population. METHODS Sharpe Hospital admissions data for a one year period were collected and demogr...

Further to the publication by the London School of Economics and Political Science of the report Ending the Drug Wars, this editorial focuses on the mental health impact of the 'war on drugs' and on the need to end such policies in favour of evidence-based interventions to manage drug dependence as a health condition.

Official statistics on suicides among children and adolescents in West Germany and Japan were used to compare transcultural social and psychiatric data on 108 German and 103 Japanese suicides and attempted suicides. This analysis revealed characteristic differences with respect to the following variables: ratio of attempted and accomplished suicide, age, method, integrating problems at school, ...

Studying prevalence of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (3rd ed., rev., American Psychiatric Association, 1987) drug dependence among Americans 15-54 years old, we found about 1 in 4 (24%) had a history of tobacco dependence; about 1 in 7 (14%) had a history of alcohol dependence; and about 1 in 13 (7.5%) had a history of dependence on an inhalant or controlled drug. About one third of tobacco...

Opioid agonists are the most effective treatment for pain, but their use is limited by side effects, tolerance and fears of addiction and dependence. A major goal of opioid research is to develop agonists that have high analgesic efficacy and a low profile for side effects, tolerance, addiction and dependence. Unfortunately, there is a serious lack of experimental data comparing the degree to w...

BACKGROUND Few studies have investigated the relationship between smoking and health-related quality of life (HRQOL), and the results are not consistent. The aim of this study is to explore the association between smoking and HRQOL. METHOD Cross-sectional study of 714 Spanish adults (44.7% never smokers and 55.3% smokers) without diagnosis of physical or mental disorder. Each participant prov...