Addiction Audio

Rob Calder talks to Dr Eleni Domzaridou about her recent article on the risk of overdose among people prescribe medication for opioid use at the same time as being prescribed other medication - such as for mental health disorders. People who use opioid drugs are often prescribed drugs for physical or mental health problems or for pain management. Eleni and the research team studied non-fatal overd...

In this episode Ben Scher talks to Dr Rebecca McKetin about her recent article looking the relationship between psychosis, psychotic symptoms and methamphetamine use. They discuss the implications and talk about who exactly is at risk of methamphetamine-related psychosis. Along the way, they cover the background of methamphetamine use in Australia and how this varies from country to country. They...

In this episode, Dr Elle Wadsworth talks to Dr Katherine Keyes about her study examining changes to hallucinogen use among young adults in the US. Katherine also talks about using the Monitoring The Future survey to identify patterns of substance use among young adults. "...going from 2020 to 2021 we really saw substantial increases in the prevalence of young adults who are reporting that they use...

In this episode Ben Scher talks to Professor Louise Nadeau about her recent article anaysing the content of a Latin-language treatise on gambling addiction written nearly 500 years ago. Ben and Louise discuss the medical model of gambling and issues of historic identification. They unpick how the original authors wrote about the medical model of addiction long before it was called that. Parts of t...

In this episode, Chloe Burke talks to Dr Jamie Hartmann-Boyce about new guidance from the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group (TAG) on assessing and minimising risk of bias in tobacco cessation trials. Jamie explains some of the key challenges in this area and explains some of the primary sources of bias that authors need to be aware of when analysing tobacco cessation trials. This article was publis...

In this episode, Dr Elle Wadsworth talks to Dr Janni Leung about her work on a systematic review of the evidence on cannabis arrests, cannabis products and prices since Canada legalised cannabis. Janni talks discusses how arrest figures have changed, along with trends in legal and illicit purchase of cannabis. She covers issues relating to cannabis packaging and the potential for this to have an i...

In this episode Ben Scher talks to Dr Thomas Brothers about his qualitative systematic review looking at infections from injecting drug use. Tommy and Ben talk about bacterial and fungal infections and how social and structural factors can have a detrimental impact on access to treatment and health outcomes for people who use drugs. Tommy discusses the differences between countries, highlighting t...

In this episode, Rob Calder talks to Marleen Olthof and Dr Matthijs Blankers about their research into ICan - a digital health app designed to reduce cannabis use. They initially talk about the potential of using apps to improve health and support people who use drugs before also discussing how apps can improve access to support.   “It’s a much smaller step to sign up for a digital interventi...

Professor Joanne Neale talks to Addiction Audio about her latest research into how people feel during the first 72 hours of having long-acting buprenorphine (Buvidal). Jo talks about the recent history of this medication and how it predated the COVID-19 pandemic and was then brought to attention because it meant that people did not have to attend a pharmacy on a daily basis. Jo also talks about ho...

Dr Perski explains the evolution of Ecological Momentry Assessment (EMA) studies and how they have been used to collect granular data relating to everyday experiences. Olga's latest review focuses on EMA studies and smoking, looking at lapse and relapse. She talks about how EMA can be used to test and develop models and theories of addiction in ways that cross-sectional studies cannot. She also co...

Rob talks to Dr Will Lawn about his research into the acute effects of cannabis on young people and adults. Will talks about setting up a study looking at young people and adults’ experiences of using cannabis with different levels of cannabidiol. He talks about the challenges of blinding participants to different types of cannabis; about how to manage the placebo effect when participants can beco...

In this episode, Dr Katherine East talks about her recent article on heated tobacco product use. When conducting this research, Katie talked to former and current smokers who use IQOS to understand the words they use to describe themselves and what they do in relation to heated tobacco products. Katie and Rob then talk about how the language can reflect identity and how this can influence the risk...

In this episode, Harry Tattan-Birch talks about his recent article on the increased popularity of disposable vaping products. He discusses the difference between this new generation of vaping products compared with the original versions. He talks about the data that suggest a rise in vaping alongside a lack of change in use of nicotine products overall. And the three reasons why disposable vapes h...

In this episode of Addiction Audio, Rob Talks to Dr Ashley Gearhardt from the University of Michigan about whether highly processed foods can be considered to be addictive substances. Dr Gearhardt starts by defining highly processed foods before covering the issues that arise from having an addictive substance (such as food) that you can’t ‘opt out’ of. Ashley makes comparisons with other addictiv...

In this episode of Addiction Audio, Rob talks to Ebtesam Saleh a Doctoral student at the Charite university in Berlin. Ebtesam talks about her recent systematic review of qualitative research on substance use among refugees. She talks about talks about the limitations of using survey data to explore this issue and how qualitative research can help contextualise the problems faced by refugees in a...

In this episode of Addiction Audio, Drs Mignonne Guy and Megan Piper talk about their work on the racial equity taskforce for the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT). It was a powerful and wide-ranging discussion about developing anti-racist practice, social constructs of race, research methods, society organisations and research funding structures. Megan and Mignonne began by talk...

In this episode we talk to Dr Sharon Cox about developing an ontology around nicotine and tobacco products. Sharon also talks about the importance of ontologies and how they are important for research. She talks about how to manage disagreements when developing a system that categorises and defines products, behaviours and properties.   “So, as researchers, which we are, we should be pedants...

In this episode, Professor Matt Hickman talks about using population modelling to identify the population implications of Opioid Agonist Treatment (OAT). He covers the impact that OAT has on drug-related deaths and other causes of mortality as well as how models can be used to explore what mortality rates would have been without OAT in New South Wales, Australia. Professor Hickman talks about thei...

In this episode Dr Alexander Denissoff talks about his recent research into the potential associations between cannabis use and later life bipolar disorder. He discusses the basis for hypotheses that link cannabis and bipolar disorder, outlining what the Northern Finland Birth Cohort is and how it was used in this study. “It’s an ongoing birth cohort which included 99% of all live births in the tw...

In this episode, Tori Horn from the University of Memphis talks about her recent systematic review of risk-taking and gambling whilst drinking. Tori talks about the moderators between alcohol and risk-taking and how her and her colleagues screened 30,000 papers to examine the influence of blood alcohol concentration, gender, the type of gambling and other factors as potential moderators of this re...

In this episode of the Addiction Audio podcast, Dr Paolo Deluca talks about his recent research on using brief interventions in emergency departments. The research involved a three-armed randomised controlled trial on brief interventions for young people, and found no significant differences in alcohol-related outcomes between young people who had been given a brief intervention and those who had...

In this episode of Addiction Audio, Nazlee Maghsoudi talks about her recent publication “Drug checking services for people who use drugs: a systematic review”. Nazlee discusses how drug checking services change behaviour, contribute to drug market monitoring and otherwise impact the risk associated with using substances. She talks about the three waves of drug checking services from the late 1960s...

Dr Iain Hardie talks to Addiction Audio about his research into alcohol use changes during lockdown. His research is the first to report longitudinal data on changes in drinking quantities and characteristics. Dr Hardie talks about using an interrupted time series analysis to identify the impact of the pandemic on drinking habits. “A lot of [drinking] occasions in general that start earlier in the...

In this episode of Addiction Audio, Professor John Marsden talks about the role of pre-registration in increasing research transparency. He addresses the anxieties that people can have about pre-registration and talks about how it’s really not that difficult or daunting. Professor Marsden talks gets into the detail of pre-registration; when to register, how to register and the importance of planni...

Dr Elis Haan talks to Dr Rob Calder about ADHD and maternal substance use. She discusses her recent paper which explored the impact of smoking, alcohol and drugs during pregnancy on ADHD outcomes in young people. Elis talks about the differences between maternal and teacher ratings of ADHD. She also explains negative control and polygenic risk score methods used in this study discussing how multip...