The Appalachian Tri-State Node Experiences with the National Institute on Drug Abuse Clinical Trials Network.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-sponsored Clinical Trial Network (CTN) recently celebrated 10 years of conducting "real world" research into the treatment of addiction. This article reviews the history and results of the most recent CTN studies and describes the experiences of one of the 13 participating research affiliates, the Appalachian Tri-State (ATS) Node. We discuss our "bidirectional" collaboration with multiple community treatment programs (CTPs) on research and dissemination activities and include their experiences as a member of our ATS Node.Results of CTN clinical trials have found unexpectedly that treatment as usual (TAU) is often almost as good as evidence-based interventions such as Motivational Interviewing (MI), possibly due to the difficulty in implementing evidence-based practices most effectively among divergent treatment sites and heterogeneous clinical populations. Some expected findings from the reviewed research are that severity of addiction and comorbidity moderate treatment outcomes and must be accounted for in future CTN-sponsored studies. Notwithstanding these results, much has been learned and recommendations are suggested for changes in CTN research designs that will address methodological limitations and increase treatment effectiveness in future CTN studies.

A method to diagnose opioid dependence resulting from heroin versus prescription opioids using the Composite International Diagnostic Interview.

Treatment research with opioid-dependent populations has not traditionally distinguished between those dependent on prescription opioids versus dependent upon heroin. Evidence suggests there is a substantial subpopulation of individuals with opioid dependence resulting largely or exclusively from prescription opioid use. Because this subpopulation may respond to treatment differently from heroin users, a method for discriminating DSM-IV opioid dependence due to prescription opioid use would provide more precision when examining this population. This paper describes an innovative method using a currently available diagnostic instrument, to diagnose DSM-IV opioid dependence and distinguish between dependence resulting from prescription opioids versus dependence upon heroin.