Publications by authors named "Bach P"

Aims: We measured the association between prescribed stimulant medications and overdose among individuals receiving opioid agonist therapy (OAT) for opioid use disorder.

Design: Retrospective cohort study using the British Columbia Provincial Overdose Cohort, a linked administrative database.

Setting: We used data from British Columbia, Canada, from January 2015 through February 2020.

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Background: Advancing evidence-based, tailored interventions for substance use disorders (SUDs) requires understanding temporal directionality while upholding ecological validity. Previous studies identified loneliness and craving as pivotal factors associated with alcohol consumption, yet the precise directionality of these relationships remains ambiguous.

Objective: This study aims to establish a smartphone-based real-life intervention platform that integrates momentary assessment and intervention into everyday life.

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Objective: To examine the association between newer generation antidepressants and insomnia as an adverse event (AE) in the treatment of children and adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD).

Method: A systematic search was performed in major databases (inception to August 31, 2023) to retrieve double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating the safety of 19 antidepressants in the acute treatment (initial 6 to 12 weeks) of children and adolescents aged ≤ 18 years with MDD (primary analyses). RCTs in anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) were retrieved from a recent meta-analysis and included in complementary analyses.

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Introduction: To examine the value of tumor size, weight, and density in predicting pathological tumor stage in patients with suspected bladder cancer (BCa), minimize interobserver variability of estimated tumor size, and thus provide a more objective instrument to describe the extent of local tumor growth.

Methods: An institutional dataset of 588 consecutive patients undergoing TUR-BT for suspected BCa from 05/2016 - 09/2018 was used. Separate Mann-Whitney-U tests examined differences in each unit between non-muscle-invasive (NMIBC) and muscle-invasive BCa (MIBC) and between Ta/CIS and T1 NMIBC.

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Although alcohol use disorder (AUD) is highly prevalent, only a few medications are approved for its treatment leaving much room for improvement. Cannabidiol (CBD) might be a particularly promising candidate, with preclinical data suggesting that CBD is effective in targeting AUD symptoms and disease processes that drive alcohol use and relapse, due to its anti-craving, stress-reducing, and anti-compulsive effects. Here we report data from the double-blind randomized controlled ICONIC trial that compared the effects of a single dose of 800 mg cannabidiol against placebo (PLC) in N = 28 individuals with AUD.

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Importance: Early administration of supplemental oxygen for all severely injured trauma patients is recommended, but liberal oxygen treatment has been associated with increased risk of death and respiratory complications.

Objective: To determine whether an early 8-hour restrictive oxygen strategy compared with a liberal oxygen strategy in adult trauma patients would reduce death and/or major respiratory complications.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This randomized controlled trial enrolled adult trauma patients transferred directly to hospitals, triggering a full trauma team activation with an anticipated hospital stay of a minimum of 24 hours from December 7, 2021, to September 12, 2023.

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Alcohol consumption (AC) is a leading risk factor for death, morbidity, and disability worldwide. Gender-specific differences in AC and its moderators, which may serve as markers for preventing severe alcohol use disorders (AUD), showed inconsistent results. Additionally, the impact of COVID-19-related lockdowns on these differences remains unclear.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The 2024 update of the 2018 National Guideline for Clinical Management of Opioid Use Disorder emphasizes the need for current scientific evidence to inform treatment practices for opioid use disorder in Canada.
  • - A comprehensive review from 2017 to 2023 was conducted to revise the guidelines, involving a national committee including those with personal experience in opioid use disorder, and ensuring quality through established methods.
  • - Key changes in the recommendations include recognizing methadone and buprenorphine as equally effective first-line treatments, introducing slow-release oral morphine as a second-line option, and highlighting that psychosocial interventions should be optional rather than mandatory.
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Background: Morbidity and mortality related to substance use have risen to catastrophic levels in North America, and treatment services are often difficult to access. In response, the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, launched a province-wide addiction medicine support phone line that offers clinicians immediate access to phone consultation with an addictions medicine expert. The service operates 24/7 is accessible to any clinician in the province seeking assistance with an addiction-related question.

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Problems caused by urban heat have prompted the exploration of urban greenery and blue spaces for heat mitigation. Various numerical models can simulate heat-related processes, but their use as support-tools to urban planners remains underexplored, particularly at the city-scale, due to high computational demand and complexity of such models. This study investigates the spatial relationships between urban heat, urban form and urban green and blue spaces with the fast climate model TARGET (The Air-temperature Response to Green/blue-infrastructure Evaluation Tool), which only requires minimal inputs of standard meteorological data, land cover and building geometry data.

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Circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) assays for monitoring individuals with cancer typically rely on prior identification of tumor-specific mutations. Here, we develop a tumor-independent and mutation-independent approach (DELFI-tumor fraction, DELFI-TF) using low-coverage whole genome sequencing to determine the cfDNA tumor fraction and validate the method in two independent cohorts of patients with colorectal or lung cancer. DELFI-TF scores strongly correlate with circulating tumor DNA levels (ctDNA) (r = 0.

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Article Synopsis
  • Previous studies showed limited evidence on how buprenorphine versus methadone affects different groups of people using opioids, particularly with the rise of fentanyl use.
  • The study aimed to compare the risks of treatment discontinuation and mortality between individuals using buprenorphine/naloxone versus those using methadone for opioid use disorder in British Columbia from 2010 to 2020.
  • Findings revealed that users of buprenorphine/naloxone had a significantly higher likelihood of discontinuing treatment after 24 months compared to those on methadone, with 88.8% versus 81.5% discontinuing, indicating that methadone may be more effective in retaining users.
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Article Synopsis
  • The Medicare part D Low-Income Subsidy (LIS) helps with oral cancer drugs but doesn't support clinician-administered drugs, highlighting a gap in cancer treatment assistance.
  • An analysis using SEER-Medicare data from 2015-2017 found that LIS participants had lower odds of receiving any systemic therapy and tended to receive less effective treatments compared to non-LIS participants.
  • Overall, the study suggests that LIS may negatively impact access to optimal cancer treatment, leading to worse outcomes for certain patients.
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Background: Among patients with opioid use disorder (OUD), high rates of overdose and death have been reported in subgroups with Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). Evidence on the comorbid effect of HCV on clinical and substance use trajectories has been limited by small sample sizes, short follow-up, and heavy reliance on administrative data which lacks granularity on important prognostic factors. Additionally, few studies include populations on substance use treatment.

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Introduction: The Road to Recovery (R2R) Initiative is an innovative model of substance use care that seeks to increase treatment capacity by creating approximately 100 new addiction treatment beds to provide on-demand addiction care in Vancouver, British Columbia, for patients with substance use disorders. The new model also coordinates the region's existing clinical substance use services to support patients across a care continuum that includes traditional office-based addiction treatment and harm reduction services, early withdrawal management and more intensive abstinence-based treatment programming. To understand the impact of offering on-demand and coordinated substance use care, an observational cohort of individuals who access any R2R clinical service will be created to examine health and social outcomes over time.

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Objectives: Widespread health service disruptions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a dramatic increase in overdose deaths among people who use drugs (PWUD) in Vancouver, Canada. Those with a history of injection drug use are known to be at heightened risk of substance-associated harms. Drug use patterns and associated sociodemographic and health care utilization trends have been understudied in this population since the pandemic onset.

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In the United States, 2.0 million new cancer cases and around 600,000 cancer deaths are estimated to occur in 2024. Early detection gives cancer patients the best chance for treatment success.

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Lung cancer mortality rates, particularly non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), continue to present a significant global health challenge, and the adoption of lung cancer screening remains limited, often influenced by inequities in access to healthcare. Despite clinical evidence demonstrating the efficacy of annual screening with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) and recommendations from medical organizations including the U.S.

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Background And Objectives: History of nonfatal overdose (NFO) is common among people who use opioids, but little is known about opioid agonist treatment (OAT) outcomes for this high-risk subpopulation. The objective of this study was to investigate the relative effectiveness of buprenorphine/naloxone and methadone on retention and suppression of opioid use among individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD) and history of NFO.

Methods: Secondary analysis of a pan-Canadian pragmatic trial comparing flexible take-home buprenorphine/naloxone and supervised methadone for people with OUD and history of NFO.

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Substance use disorders (SUDs) are seen as a continuum ranging from goal-directed and hedonic drug use to loss of control over drug intake with aversive consequences for mental and physical health and social functioning. The main goals of our interdisciplinary German collaborative research centre on Losing and Regaining Control over Drug Intake (ReCoDe) are (i) to study triggers (drug cues, stressors, drug priming) and modifying factors (age, gender, physical activity, cognitive functions, childhood adversity, social factors, such as loneliness and social contact/interaction) that longitudinally modulate the trajectories of losing and regaining control over drug consumption under real-life conditions. (ii) To study underlying behavioural, cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms of disease trajectories and drug-related behaviours and (iii) to provide non-invasive mechanism-based interventions.

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Background: Consumption of stimulant drugs, a heterogeneous group of addictive substances, has significantly increased in recent years with rising numbers of stimulant-associated intoxication and deaths.

Objective: To provide an overview of recent scientific evidence of the diagnosis and treatment of stimulant use disorders.

Material And Methods: A literature review of the neuropathology, clinical presentation, diagnostic criteria and evidence-based treatment for stimulant use disorders.

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The development of an ecosystem approach to fisheries management makes the assessment of the sustainability performance of fisheries a priority. This study examines European tropical tuna purse seine fleets as a case study, employing a multidisciplinary dashboard approach to evaluate historical and current sustainability performances. The aim is to enhance comprehension of the interconnected dimensions of sustainability and pinpoint management policy priorities.

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Lung cancer screening via annual low-dose computed tomography has poor adoption. We conducted a prospective case-control study among 958 individuals eligible for lung cancer screening to develop a blood-based lung cancer detection test that when positive is followed by a low-dose computed tomography. Changes in genome-wide cell-free DNA fragmentation profiles (fragmentomes) in peripheral blood reflected genomic and chromatin characteristics of lung cancer.

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Background: Industry payments to US cancer centers are poorly understood.

Methods: US National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated comprehensive cancer centers were identified (n = 51). Industry payments to NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers from 2014 to 2021 were obtained from Open Payments and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funding from NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT).

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