Empirically contrasting urine drug screening-based opioid use disorder treatment outcome definitions.

Background And Aims: A lack of consensus on the optimal outcome measures to assess opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment efficacy and their precise definition and computation has hampered the pooling of research data for evidence synthesis and meta-analyses. This study aimed to empirically contrast multiple clinical trial definitions of treatment success by applying them to the same dataset.

Methods: Data analysis used a suite of functions, developed as a software package for the R language, to operationalize 61 treatment outcome definitions based on urine drug screening (UDS) results.

Capturing drug use patterns at a glance: An n-ary word sufficient statistic for repeated univariate categorical values.

Introduction: The efficacy of treatments for substance use disorders (SUD) is tested in clinical trials in which participants typically provide urine samples to detect whether the person has used certain substances via urine drug screenings (UDS). UDS data form the foundation of treatment outcome assessment in the vast majority of SUD clinical trials. However, existing methods to calculate treatment outcomes are not standardized, impeding comparability between studies and prohibiting reproducibility of results.