Although there is no single cure for tobacco dependence, there are numerous effective treatments for promoting cessation. Using the chronic disease model of advising and counseling, this article outlines a model for helping patients overcome tobacco dependence. This model consists of the five A's: Ask, Advise, Assess, Assist, and Arrange. Although most of this article focuses on how clinicians ...

Asthma and COPD are the most important chronic airways diseases worldwide. Urbanization and westernization of African countries are important factors for the development of chronic respiratory diseases. Unfortunately for many reasons, only few studies on atopy, asthma and COPD have been carried out in Africa and risk factors are not well known on the continent. Moreover, in many African countri...

OBJECTIVES Previous research identified alexithymia as a potential risk factor for substance use disorders (SUD). More insight into the relation between alexithymia and SUD is needed in order to treat SUD effectively. Therefore, we investigated whether a familial vulnerability to alcoholism relates to the presence and severity of alexithymia in SUD patients. METHOD Hospitalized, abstinent SUD...

Markov Chains provide support for problems involving decision on uncertainties through a continuous period of time. The greater availability and access to processing power through computers allow that these models can be used more often to represent clinical structures. Markov models consider the patients in a discrete state of health, and the events represent the transition from one state to a...

Methamphetamine (MA) is a potent, addictive psychostimulant that has dramatic effects on the central nervous system (CNS). The onset of methamphetamine use has been linked to heightened attention, and chronic methamphetamine use has been associated with deficits in different aspects of attention that can significantly persist into abstinence. Attention deficits in chronic methamphetamine users ...