Evaluating provider report of fidelity to contingency management in opioid treatment programs.

Introduction: With growing adoption of contingency management (CM) in addiction treatment programs, ensuring intervention fidelity over time is essential for improving patient outcomes. Nonetheless, ensuring an intervention is delivered as intended can be time- and resource-intensive for organizations. Finding ways to monitor fidelity without unduly burdening health systems is critical.

"Healthier health in more ways than one": Perspectives on a program for changing both smoking and obesity-related health behaviors.

Introduction: Individuals with obesity who smoke cigarettes have increased risk of morbidity and mortality. The goal of the current study was to inform the development of a multiple health behavior change intervention designed to facilitate smoking cessation while also targeting weight gain.

Methods: Four qualitative focus groups were conducted with individuals who smoked cigarettes and had overweight or obesity (n = 16) to explore the combined effects of smoking and obesity, past attempts to quit smoking or lose weight, and preferences for a combined health intervention.

Acute effects of exercise among individuals with schizophrenia who smoke cigarettes.

People with schizophrenia (SCZ) have a shorter life expectancy than those without psychiatric conditions. Of note, people with SCZ have high rates of cigarette smoking, physical inactivity, and obesity. These factors all coalesce to contribute to compromised health in this population, with smoking as a primary contributor.

Neuroeconomic predictors of smoking cessation outcomes: A preliminary study of delay discounting in treatment-seeking adult smokers.

Large proportions of smokers are unsuccessful in evidence-based smoking cessation treatment and identifying prognostic predictors may inform improvements in treatment. Steep discounting of delayed rewards (delay discounting) is a robust predictor of poor smoking cessation outcome, but the underlying neural predictors have not been investigated. Forty-one treatment-seeking adult smokers completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) delay discounting paradigm prior to initiating a 9-week smoking cessation treatment protocol.

Virtual Training Is More Cost-Effective Than In-Person Training for Preparing Staff to Implement Contingency Management.

Behavior therapy implementation relies in part on training to foster counselor skills in preparation for delivery with fidelity. Amidst Covid-19, the professional education arena witnessed a rapid shift from in-person to virtual training, yet these modalities' relative utility and expense is unknown. In the context of a cluster-randomized hybrid type 3 trial of contingency management (CM) implementation in opioid treatment programs (OTPs), a multi-cohort design presented rare opportunity to compare cost-effectiveness of virtual vs.

Initial development and validation of a brief assessment of marijuana demand among young adult college students.

Hypothetical purchase tasks assess substance demand, but the length of purchase tasks makes repeated assessment of state-dependent changes in demand difficult, often limiting clinical utility. Although brief assessments of alcohol and cigarette demand exist, brief measures of cannabis demand do not. College students ( = 209, = 19.

The Role of Financial Strain and Educational Attainment on Smoking Abstinence of African Americans and Whites Who Smoke.

Objective: To examine if reduced financial strain and higher educational attainment would confer less advantage for successful cessation among African Americans than for White individuals.

Design: A secondary data analysis of the Quit2Live study, a smoking cessation intervention for individuals who smoke.

Setting: Recruited participants from a metropolitan city in the Midwest.

Project MIMIC (Maximizing Implementation of Motivational Incentives in Clinics): A cluster-randomized type 3 hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial.

Background: Opioid-related overdoses and harms have been declared a public health emergency in the United States, highlighting an urgent need to implement evidence-based treatments. Contingency management (CM) is one of the most effective behavioral interventions when delivered in combination with medication for opioid use disorder, but its implementation in opioid treatment programs is woefully limited. Project MIMIC (Maximizing Implementation of Motivational Incentives in Clinics) was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to identify effective strategies for helping opioid treatment programs improve CM implementation as an adjunct to medication.

Health Professional Stigma as a Barrier to Contingency Management Implementation in Opioid Treatment Programs.

Contingency management (CM) has robust evidence of effectiveness as an adjunct to medication for opioid use disorders. However, CM implementation in opioid treatment programs has been limited by a myriad of well-documented barriers. One relatively unexplored barrier that may hinder CM implementation is health professional stigma toward patients with opioid use disorders.

Physics-guided neural network for predicting chemical signatures.

Achieving high classification accuracy on trace chemical residues in active spectroscopic sensing is challenging due to the limited amount of training data available to the classifier. Such classifiers often rely on physics-based models for generating training data though these models are not always accurate when compared to measured data. To overcome this challenge, we developed a physics-guided neural network (PGNN) for predicting chemical reflectance for a set of parameterized inputs that is more accurate than the state-of-the-art physics-based signature model for chemical residues.

Implementation support for contingency management: preferences of opioid treatment program leaders and staff.

Background: Contingency management (CM), a behavioral intervention that provides incentives for achieving treatment goals, is an evidence-based adjunct to medication to treat opioid use disorder. Unfortunately, many front-line treatment providers do not utilize CM, likely due to contextual barriers that limit effective training and ongoing support for evidence-based practices. This study applied user-informed approaches to adapt a multi-level implementation strategy called the Science to Service Laboratory (SSL) to support CM implementation.

Food addiction in a large community sample of Canadian adults: prevalence and relationship with obesity, body composition, quality of life and impulsivity.

Background And Aims: Parallels between the persistent overconsumption of food and addictive drugs have given rise to the notion of food addiction. In a large community sample of Canadian adults, the current study examined the prevalence of food addiction and its relationship with obesity, quality of life and multiple indicators of impulsivity. A secondary goal was to analyze differences between obese and non-obese individuals with and without food addiction.

Multidimensional elements of impulsivity as shared and unique risk factors for food addiction and alcohol misuse.

Food addiction (FA) and alcohol misuse tend to co-occur, which suggests shared factors in the etiology and persistence of these health behaviors. One shared factor that has been linked to both is impulsivity, a multidimensional construct reflecting multiple facets of self-regulatory capacity. However, co-occurrence also raises issues of possible confounding if both domains are not considered concurrently, and the intersection between FA, alcohol misuse, and impulsivity has not been well characterized empirically.

Associations between the Brief Assessment of Alcohol Demand (BAAD) questionnaire and alcohol use disorder severity in UK samples of student and community drinkers.

Value based choice and compulsion theories of addiction offer distinct explanations for the persistence of alcohol use despite harms. Choice theory argues that problematic drinkers ascribe such high value to alcohol that costs are outweighed, whereas compulsion theory argues that problematic drinkers discount costs in decision making. The current study evaluated these predictions by testing whether alcohol use disorder (AUD) symptom severity (indexed by the AUDIT) was more strongly associated with the intensity item (maximum alcohol consumption if free, indexing alcohol value) compared to the breakpoint item (maximum expenditure on a single drink, indexing sensitivity to monetary costs) of the Brief Assessment of Alcohol Demand (BAAD) questionnaire, in student (n = 579) and community (n = 120) drinkers.

Behavioral economic tobacco demand in relation to cigarette consumption and nicotine dependence: a meta-analysis of cross-sectional relationships.

Background And Aims: A cigarette purchase task (CPT) aims to characterize individual variation in the reinforcing value of tobacco. This meta-analysis estimated the associations between cigarette demand, tobacco consumption and nicotine dependence using this task.

Design: A meta-analysis of cross-sectional studies identified by PubMed and PsycINFO databases was conducted.

User-centered design of contingency management for implementation in opioid treatment programs: a qualitative study.

Background: Contingency management (CM) is one of the only behavioral interventions shown to be effective for the treatment of opioid use disorders when delivered alone and in combination with pharmacotherapy. Despite extensive empirical support, uptake of CM in community settings remains abysmally low. The current study applied user-centered design principles to gather qualitative data on familiarity with CM, current clinical practice, and preferences regarding the implementation of CM in community-based opioid treatment programs.

Brief Assessment of Cigarette Demand (BACD): Initial development and correlational results in adults and adolescents.

Developing briefer behavioral economic measures is an important priority to ensure that these measures can be used in a variety of different contexts and to reduce participant burden. We developed and sought to validate a Brief Assessment of Cigarette Demand (BACD). A 17-item Cigarette Purchase Task (CPT) and a 3-item BACD were completed concurrently in 2 community samples of smokers (Study 1, adult smokers [n = 80] with substance use disorders; Study 2, adolescent smokers [n = 81]).

Low Self-Esteem for Physical Appearance Mediates the Effect of Body Mass Index on Smoking Initiation Among Adolescents.

Objective: Adolescence is a period during which youth may begin experimenting with substances. Youth with overweight or obesity may be at increased risk for substance use, including cigarette smoking. Understanding the associations between smoking and excess weight and the pathways associated with increased likelihood for smoking initiation is of particular importance given the increased risk for negative health outcomes associated with each.

Smoking outcome expectancies predict smoking during voucher-based treatment for smokers with substance use disorders.

Objective: Strong expectations regarding positive effects of smoking may reduce the likelihood of successfully quitting. The Smoking Effects Questionnaire (SEQ) assesses the importance of seven expected positive and negative effects of smoking. SEQ was used to predict responses to contingent monetary rewards for smoking abstinence among smokers with substance use disorders (SUD).

Smoking and weight loss among smokers with overweight and obesity in Look AHEAD.

Unlabelled: Smoking cessation is associated with increases in body weight, but little is known about the relationship between participation in a weight loss intervention and smoking.

Objective: To determine whether (a) weight losses at 1 year differ as a function of baseline smoking status (never smoker, current smoker, ex-smoker) and (b) participation in a weight loss intervention affects smoking behavior.

Method: This analysis addressed these questions using the publicly available database from Look AHEAD, a randomized trial comparing intensive lifestyle intervention (ILI) and diabetes support and education (DSE; control condition) among individuals with overweight/obesity and Type 2 diabetes, and included 4,387 participants who had self-reported smoking and objective weight measures available at baseline and at 1 year.

Cognitive risk factors of electronic and combustible cigarette use in adolescents.

Introduction: Cognitive susceptibility to cigarette smoking has been demonstrated to predict future cigarette initiation in adolescents. Examining this construct prior to tobacco product initiation may provide useful information on the differential risk of individuals initiating cigarette vs. e-cigarette products.

Effects of varenicline versus transdermal nicotine replacement therapy on cigarette demand on quit day in individuals with substance use disorders.

Rationale: Cigarette demand is a behavioral economic measure of the relative value of cigarettes. Decreasing the value of cigarette reinforcement may help with quitting smoking.

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the effects of initial use of varenicline (VAR) versus nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) on demand for cigarettes on quit day among smokers with substance use disorders (SUD) and to determine whether reduced demand was associated with subsequent abstinence from smoking at 1 and 3 months.

Neural correlates of graphic cigarette warning labels predict smoking cessation relapse.

Exposure to graphic warning labels (GWLs) on cigarette packaging has been found to produce heightened activity in brain regions central to emotional processing and higher-order cognitive processes. The current study extends this literature by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural activation in response to GWLs and use it to predict relapse in an evidence-based smoking cessation treatment program. Participants were 48 treatment-seeking nicotine-dependent smokers who completed an fMRI paradigm in which they were exposed to GWLs, text-only warning labels (TOLs), and matched control stimuli.