Aims Our study sought to assess the prevalence of and risk factors for opioid drug dependence among out-patients on long-term opioid therapy in a large health-care system. Methods Using electronic health records, we identified out-patients receiving 4+ physician orders for opioid therapy in the past 12 months for non-cancer pain within a large US health-care system. We completed diagnostic inte...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new estimation method for estimating the Archimedean copula dependence parameter in the non-parametric setting. The estimation of the dependence parameter has been selected as the value that minimizes the Cramér-von-Mises distance which measures the distance between Empirical Bernstein Kendall distribution function and true Kendall distribution functi...

modeling dependence structure in financial economics is of paramount importance when estimating portfolio’s value at risk, since risk of an asset in addition to its own behavior is also dependent on the behavior of other assets in the portfolio. application of joint distribution copula is one of the methods for incorporation dependence at lower and upper tail of returns’ distribution in financi...

background: chronic use of opioids usually results in physical dependence. the underlying mechanisms for this dependence are still being evaluated. transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1 (trpv1) are important receptors of pain perception. their role during opioid dependence has not been studied well. the aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of morphine-dependence on the expressio...

BACKGROUND Evidence suggests that cannabis users are at increased risk for cigarette smoking--if so, this may potentially be the single most alarming public health challenge posed by cannabis use. We examine whether cannabis use prior to age 17 years is associated with an increased likelihood of DSM-IV nicotine dependence and the extent to which genetic and environmental factors contribute to t...

BACKGROUND We examined prospectively determined bidirectional associations between smoking and panic and other anxiety disorders and their temporal ordering of onset in a representative community sample of adolescents and young adults. METHODS Baseline and 4-year follow-up data were used from the Early Developmental Stages of Psychopathology Study, a prospective longitudinal study of adolesce...

A national household probability sample of 4,023 adolescents aged 12 to 17 years was interviewed by telephone about substance use, victimization experiences, familial substance use, and posttraumatic reactions to identify risk factors for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--(4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) defined substance abuse/dependence. Age and ethnicity...