NIDA to Present Sessions on SUDs, Youth Development

During APA’s 2020 Annual Meeting, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is sponsoring three sessions highlighting the latest research findings on substance use disorders (SUD) and how they might apply to both research and practice.

One session will discuss findings on the large, underserved population of patients with SUD and psychiatric comorbidities and explore strategies to accelerate the development of evidence-based, integrative treatments for this population. Clinical care of SUD has conventionally been separated from the treatment of other psychiatric conditions, and research has tended to examine either one or the other. Yet understanding how SUD and co-occurring mental health conditions present together in patients—and how they interact—can be essential for proper diagnosis and treatment of both.

The session, titled “Translational Perspectives on Psychiatric Comorbidities in Substance Use Disorders,” will address challenges to treating this patient population and highlight how advances in epidemiological and neurobehavioral research are informing our understanding of these co-occurring conditions. Speakers will review patterns in the co-occurrence of SUD and psychiatric conditions, shared risk factors and neurocognitive signatures, and gaps in mechanistic research relevant to understanding these comorbidities.

Another NIDA session is titled “Are Your Patients With Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) Worried, Losing Sleep, or Dealing With Trauma?” While medications for OUD have become the mainstay of OUD treatment, patients misusing opioids or receiving medication treatment frequently present with complexities such as sleep disturbances, anxiety, or trauma-related conditions. These conditions, if not addressed, can lead to nonadherence to treatment regimens and relapse. It is critical for OUD treatment providers to be aware of these complexities so that they can manage or treat them and give their patients the best possible opportunities for success. The presenters will describe the neural underpinnings of each of these comorbid conditions and offer guidance on mitigating their risks and managing them to improve patient outcomes.

The final session in the NIDA series, titled “The Developmental Perspective in Brain and Behavior: Analytic Tools and Findings From the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study,” focuses on the ABCD study. This is a multisite, longitudinal study of nearly 12,000 youth starting at age 9 and 10 designed to increase understanding of how diverse experiences influence adolescent development.

The first speaker will provide a conceptual overview of analytic tools for the evaluation of neurological and behavioral development in longitudinal studies. The session will then feature four presentations by junior investigators who use different analytic approaches to answer emerging developmental questions. Collectively, these presentations will demonstrate how the design of the ABCD study and analytic methods can be leveraged to attain some of its most important study goals, including characterizing neurodevelopmental, behavioral, and health trajectories in the population.

These data will provide an unprecedented window into how the brain develops during adolescence, potentially allowing for a better understanding of what to watch out for based on an individual’s family history and lifetime experiences, such as with substance use (by themselves or family members) and video gaming, and how such factors might affect the way the adolescent brain develops.

These sessions will also examine how NIDA-supported research is both generating evidence that could improve medical practice in the treatment of patients with SUD, as well as developing innovative approaches that will allow researchers to investigate early determinants of brain development that confer risk for psychiatric disorders. ■

NOTE: The authors of this article have requested that the article be unattributed.