14 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
The objective of this treatment development grant is to create an innovative and efficacious alcohol intervention for emerging adults using features from three theoretically sound and empirically supported approaches. A set of students will be engaged to serve as peer leaders to assist in reducing hazardous drinking behavior among their peers. This new intervention, a Bystander Brief Motivational Intervention (BBMI) spans Stages 1A and 1B of the stage model of behavioral therapies research and will utilize qualitative methods, an open trial, and a small controlled pilot trial within the targeted college community.
This study tested a deviance regulation theory intervention in a sample of university freshman. The aims were to (a) increase use of protective behavioral strategies, (b) decrease alcohol use, and (c) decrease alcohol-related consequences.
Examine the efficacy of parent interventions to prevent college student drinking in first year students.
The purpose of this study is to develop and test a new brief intervention to reduce heavy drinking and social anxiety in college drinkers.
Decisions during drinking (D3) is randomized clinical feasibility trial assessing whether health-related materials created for young adults who want to have more positive experiences if they decide to drink alcohol are acceptable and usable. Enrolled participants will be randomized to receive the health-related messages in 5-7 online modules over the 20-30 days or to only receive assessments. Those randomized to receive the intervention will also receive text-messages with health message content during the 20-30 days. After completing the intervention, participants will report on the usability and acceptability of the material, which is the main outcome. For secondary outcomes, participants in both the intervention and control will report on their drinking and drinking-related consequences in the post-intervention questionnaire (or 30 days after initial questionnaire for control participants) and 1 month later.
In this study, 140 heavy drinking young adults (aged 18-25) will be provided with brief counseling and either naltrexone, a medication that is FDA-approved for the treatment of alcohol dependence, or placebo over the course of 8 weeks. A novel strategy will be used for administering low-dose naltrexone, in which daily dosing will be combined with targeted dosing in anticipation of high-risk situations. The main hypotheses are that daily + targeted naltrexone will result in greater reductions in frequency of heavy and any drinking compared with daily + targeted placebo.
Heavy alcohol use is a pressing public health issue that results in more negative consequences for young adult women, despite them drinking at lower rates than their male peers. However, particular groups of women, such as women who identify as lesbian and bisexual (i.e., sexual minority women), evidence markedly higher rates of alcohol misuse as well as negative consequences from this use. Sexual minority women are more likely to use alcohol, do so at problematic levels, and to meet criteria for alcohol use disorders than heterosexual women and sexual minority men. Despite these disparities, as well as evidence that sexual minority women have unique mechanisms of risk (e.g., minority stress, social context), there are currently no interventions designed to reduce alcohol misuse among sexual minority women. This study represents the first attempt to design an in-person intervention specifically tailored to sexual minority women, which will be accomplished through an Intervention Mapping framework to identify behavioral determinants of their use (e.g., minority stress and distress; social context) and then map effective behavior change strategies onto these determinants.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate an intervention approach for non-student emerging adults that attempts to reduce alcohol use by decreasing stress and increasing engagement in positive and goal-directed activities that provide meaningful alternatives to alcohol use.
The proposed study will develop a smartphone/mobile app intervention that incorporates ecological momentary assessment (i.e., two brief surveys per day) and daily intervention messaging (2 messages per day) for three weeks to target high-risk alcohol use among young adult college students. The intervention mainly focuses on alcohol expectancies, alcohol use, and consequences and the daily associations between these and includes personalized intervention messages based on participants' own event-level expectations and experiences. Other psycho-educational alcohol-related content is also provided over the course of three week intervention. This mobile app intervention will be used in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) comparing young adult college students who receive the intervention with those who only receive assessments via the mobile app.
Tertiary Health Research Intervention Via Email (THRIVE; Kypri et al., 2009), originally utilized with Australian students, is unique in that it contains efficacious components derived from motivational interviewing (e.g., personalized feedback) and cognitive behavioral therapy (protective behavioral strategies), yet is very brief and has established efficacy. This study aims to test versions of THRIVE tailored to American college students. In addition to replicating original results with THRIVE, we will also test versions containing unique subsets of protective behavioral strategies to reduce alcohol consumption. The primary hypothesis is that versions of THRIVE will be associated with lower overall alcohol consumption than an assessment and brief brochure control condition.
This R01 project titled "Family-focused vs. Drinker-focused Smartphone Interventions to Reduce Drinking-related Consequences of COVID-19" is a Hybrid II RCT/implementation study to modify and test two of our alcohol smartphone interventions to address the fallout from COVID. We propose a three-arm RCT comparing a smartphone control group vs. a drinker-focused intervention vs. a family-focused intervention. All study arms recruit dyads comprising a person who drinks and a family partner.
The implementation of screening and intervention for substance use disorders, such as Screening Brief Intervention Referral to Treatment (SBIRT), in the primary care setting has faced several challenges. In the past, physicians have cited barriers such as lack of time, lack of access to treatment, and lack of financial resources. To overcome some of the barriers to screening and prevention of substance use disorders, many researchers have begun to explore novel approaches using web-based and mobile technology. While the quality of evidence is often inconsistent, there is promising research to show that interventions utilizing web-based or mobile technology for alcohol and other substance abuse can be effective. Features such as tailored feedback have shown to be more effective than similar programs without feedback, and interventions that combine self-administered therapy in conjunction with therapist-direction interventions show greater reductions in addictive behavior. In this project, the investigators proposed to enhance the Screening Brief Intervention Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) with a digital tool that aims to save physician time and improve patient adherence to treatment goals, through extensive use of shared decision making, patient self-monitoring and goal tracking, and real-time tailored patient feedback and text follow-up for patients. Increase the screening and referral of those patients at risk for substance use disorder (SUD) thereby increasing the number of patients receiving higher level substance use treatment. A total of 500 patients will be screened and randomized into two groups. 250 in the Technology Augmented Treatment group (intervention group) and 250 in the control group. The Washington State University research team, lead by Dr. McPherson, will screen and recruit subjects at CHAS Valley Clinic in Spokane, WA. Subjects in both groups will be followed up for 30 days. At the initial study enrollment visit, the intervention group will be asked questions on an iPad about their eligibility. After the initial visit, subjects in the intervention group will receive up to 4 texts/day on his/her phone that will ask questions about their health after the visit. The control group will be asked questions on an iPad and will be given a call 30 days after to ask questions about their health.
The Network Support project is part of an ongoing effort to improve treatment for alcohol dependent patients. The Network Support Project is designed to help patients change their social network from one that reinforces drinking behavior to one that reinforces sobriety. 160 patients will be assigned to one of two treatments. Each of the treatments will last 12 weeks. The first is a Network Support (NS) treatment designed to help patients develop new acquaintances and social networks. It is expected that alcohol dependent patients will benefit from increasing their contact with non-drinking people. This NS condition will be compared to a packaged CBT program for alcoholics (PCBT) that is designed to teach a number of skills to help people stop drinking, but does not address social networks per se. In order to better understand what is happening to the investigators patients, the investigators will be using daily computerized telephone calls to ask about people's experiences. This will be done both before and after treatment. Patients will also be asked to participate in follow-up interviews every 3 months for 2 years following the end of treatment.
The primary objective of the research study is to test the feasibility of a brief Internet-based intervention to reduce heavy alcohol use among young adult veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans are recruited through the social media website Facebook in two phases. In the first phase, investigators collect data from 800 veteran participants to document and analyze drinking norms in this population. In the second phase, investigators use the norms collected in Phase 1 and information from the analyses to develop and pilot test an online intervention with young adult veteran participants. Six hundred participants are recruited through Facebook and randomly assigned to intervention (N = 300) or control (N = 300) conditions. It is hypothesized that those in the intervention condition will drink less at a one-month follow-up period than those in the control condition. Investigators also collect feedback from participants on the usability of the online intervention.