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Heather Fay MHS[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Heather Fay, MHS
Program Services
FCD Educational Services
Newton, MA
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: This study was conducted by FCD Prevention Works, an international non-profit focused on school-based, substance abuse prevention. Using FCD’s database of over 50,000 6
th-12
th grade student survey responses, we sought to explore the relationship between parental permission of student substance use and negative consequences related to substance use.
We compared student alcohol and other drug use in the home, with or without a parent’s knowledge, to students’ self-reported negative consequences related to their own alcohol use. As might be expected, students who used alcohol or other drugs at home
without their parents knowing were more likely to report negative consequences in the past 12 months related to their alcohol own use. Students who used at home
with their parents knowing were protected against some negative consequences. These students were less likely than students who did not report this behavior to feel guilty about their drinking or regret something they did while drinking. However, these same students were at an
increased risk of experiencing negative consequences related to addiction. These consequences included those which are indicative of a mounting dependency on alcohol, such as needing a drink or other drug first thing in the morning, using alcohol or other drugs alone, passing out because of drinking, and getting hurt or injured as a direct result of their alcohol use.
Dr. Chin Yo Lin[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Chin-Yo Lin, Ph.D.
University of Houston
Center for Nuclear Receptors and Cell Signaling
Department of Biology and Biochemistry
Science and Engineering Research Center (SERC)
Houston, TX 77204-5056
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Lin: Many studies have established that alcohol consumption is a risk factor for breast cancer. Breast cancers associated with drinking tend to be hormone receptor-positive, the type is commonly treated with the drug tamoxifen which blocks the actions of estrogen in driving tumor growth in pre-menopausal women. Alcohol consumption has also been shown to increase the risk of disease recurrence in patients. Our study shows that alcohol can enhance the effects of estrogen by increasing cancer cell division and also reduce the efficacy of tamoxifen. The key mechanistic insight from the study is that alcohol treatment of breast cancer cells increased the expression of BRAF, a cancer-causing gene that is commonly mutated and activated in other types of cancers.
Dr. Joanne Cranwell[/caption]
Dr. Wilson Compton[/caption]
Dr. Svetlana Popova[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Svetlana Popova, M.D., Ph.Ds., M.P.H.
Senior Scientist
Social and Epidemiological Research, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Associate Professor, Epidemiology Division, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
Associate Professor, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto
Graduate Faculty Associate Member, Institute of Medical Science, University of Toronto
MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Popova: It has been known for many years that prenatal alcohol exposure is associated with a number of adverse health consequences for both the mother and developing fetus. Women who consume alcohol during pregnancy place their child(ren) at risk of developing Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), and can experience a number of other adverse pregnancy outcomes including stillbirth, spontaneous abortion, premature birth, intrauterine growth retardation, and low birth weight. It was also previously known that people with FASD have many comorbidities (the simultaneous presence of two or more chronic diseases or conditions in a patient) due to the permanent damage of prenatal alcohol exposure on the fetus. However, until now it was unknown how many and what type of diseases, and at what frequencies they occur. Therefore, we reviewed the medical and epidemiological literature to identify the disease conditions that have been found to occur in people with 
Dr. Kate Chitty[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Kate Chitty PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Sydney Medical School
School of Medical Sciences
Pharmacology
The University of Sydney
Medical Research: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Chitty: Recreational poisonings, defined here as poisonings that occur as a result of using alcohol and/or illicit or prescribed drugs for recreational purposes or to induce acute rewarding psychoactive effects, represent a significant and potentially lethal form of harm attributed to drug use. There is limited information on hospital admissions for recreational poisonings separately from all hospital admissions for drug harms, despite a surge in overdose occurring at youth events. Identifying trends in recreational poisoning will enable better planning of drug and alcohol services and government initiatives to reduce harms and consequences associated with drug and alcohol use.
Tara Gomes[/caption]
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Surveillance of the harms associated with chronic opioid use is imperative for clinicians and policy-makers to rapidly identify emerging issues related to this class of medications. However, data regarding opioid-related deaths is difficult to obtain in Canada as it is collected by local coroners and is not widely available to researchers. We conducted a validation study to evaluate whether regularly collected vital statistics data collected by Statistics Canada can be used to accurately identify opioid-related deaths in Canada.
We compared deaths identified from charts abstracted from the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario to those identified using several coding algorithms in the Statistics Canada Vital Statistics database. We found that the optimal algorithm had a sensitivity of 75% and a positive predictive value of 90%. When using this algorithm, the death data obtained from the Vital Statistics database slightly underestimated the number of opioid-related deaths in Ontario, however the trends over time were similar to the data obtained from the coroner’s office.
Dr. LaRochelle[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Marc R. Larochelle, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Boston Medical Center
Boston, MA
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Larochelle: More than 16 thousand people in the United States die from prescription opioid overdose each year. However, morbidity extends well beyond fatal overdose - nearly half a million emergency department visits each year are related to prescription opioid-related harms. Emergency department visits for misuse of opioids represent an opportunity to identify and intervene on opioid use disorders, particularly for patients who receive prescriptions for opioids to treat pain. We examined a cohort of nearly 3000 commercially insured individuals prescribed opioids for chronic pain who were treated for a nonfatal opioid overdose in an emergency department or inpatient setting. We were interested in examining rates of continued prescribing after the overdose and the association of that prescribing with risk of repeated overdose. We found that 91% of individuals received another prescription for opioids after the overdose. Those continuing to receive 
Dr. Camron Bryant[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Camron D. Bryant, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Laboratory of Addiction Genetics
Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics & Psychiatry
Boston University School of Medicine
Boston, MA 02118
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Bryant: The addictions, including addiction to psychostimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine, are heritable neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the genetic factors underlying these disorders are almost completely unknown. We used an unbiased, discovery-based genetic approach to fine map a novel candidate genetic factor influencing the acute stimulant response to methamphetamine in mice. We then directly validated the causal genetic factor using a gene editing approach. The gene - Hnrnph1 (heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein H1) - codes for an RNA binding protein that is involved in alternative splicing of hundreds of genes in the brain. Based on a genome-wide transcriptome analysis of differentially expressed genes within the striatum - a crucial brain region involved in the stimulant properties of amphetamines - we predict that Hnrnph1 is essential for proper neural development of the dopamine circuitry in the brain. These findings could have implications for understanding not only the addictions but also other neuropsychiatric disordersthat involve perturbations in the dopaminergic circuitry. (e.g., ADHD and schizophrenia) as well as neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease.
Dr. Frans Boch Waldorff[/caption]
Dr. Rigucci[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr Silvia Rigucci MD
Department of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Sensory Organs
Sapienza University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr Rigucci: Nowadays, ‘skunk-like’ products contain more Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) than they did around a decade ago and they have been shown to induce psychotic symptoms. Therefore, exploring the impact of 
Dr. Thompson[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Professor Benjamin Thompson PhD
School of Optometry and Vision Science
Faculty of Science, University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Medical Research: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Thompson: Our investigation was part of the longitudinal Infant Development and Environment and Lifestyle (IDEAL) study that was designed to investigate the effect of prenatal methamphetamine exposure on neurodevelopment. Although the negative impact of prenatal drug exposure on a wide range of neurodevelopmental outcomes such cognitive and motor function is established, the effect on vision is not well understood. To address this issue, vision testing was conducted when children in the New Zealand arm of the IDEAL study turned four and half years of age.
Although the primary focus of the IDEAL study was the impact of methamphetamine on neurodevelopment, the majority of children enrolled in the study were exposed to a range of different drugs prenatally including marijuana, nicotine and alcohol. Many children were exposed to multiple drugs. This allowed us to investigate the impact of individual drugs and their combination on the children’s visual development.
Alongside standard clinical vision tests such as visual acuity (the ‘sharpness’ of vision) and stereopsis (3D vision), we also tested the children’s ability to process complex moving patterns. This test, known as global motion perception, targets a specific network of higher-level visual areas in the brain that are thought to be particularly vulnerable to neurodevelopmental risk factors.
Dr. Aaron White[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Aaron White, PhD
Senior Scientific Advisor to the Director
Office of the Director
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. White: Recent studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that alcohol use by women in the United States might be on the rise and that long-standing gender gaps in drinking and related consequences might be narrowing. Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, we found that differences in the drinking patterns of females and males ages 12+ narrowed between 2002 and 2012 for current drinking (drinking at least once in the last 30 days), number of drinking days per month, past year DSM-IV alcohol abuse, and past-year driving under the influence of alcohol. For instance, the percentage of women who drank in the previous 30 days rose from 44% to 48%, while for men the percentage decreased from 57% to 56%. Average 
