Oral methadone maintenance is a widely adopted and effective treatment for heroin and other opioid dependencies. However, injectable methadone usage may pose greater risks than heroin itself. Despite decades of oral methadone treatment in Spain, there is limited understanding of the motivations for parenteral consumption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic particularly affected the health of vulnerable population, such as people who use drugs. Due to compromised baseline health status, certain drug uses and settings and socioeconomic deprivation related to poverty and homelessness, drug users faced higher risk of COVID-19 infection. They had difficulty in adhering to the public health measures (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Mood disorders are the second most prevalent mental disorders in childhood and adolescence. Many undiagnosed people manifest subthreshold symptoms, like low mood, and present worse prognoses than asymptomatic healthy subjects. The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of low mood, gender inequalities, and associated factors, in 12- to 18-year-old adolescents in the rural and medium-sized urban areas of Central Catalonia during the 2019-2020 academic year.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe coexistence of a substance use disorder and another mental disorder in the same individual has been called dual disorder or dual diagnosis. This study aimed to examine the prevalence of lifetime dual disorder in individuals with alcohol or cocaine use disorder and their retention in treatment. We conducted a pilot cohort study of individuals (n = 1356) with alcohol or cocaine use disorder admitted to treatment in the public outpatient services of Barcelona (Spain) from January 2015 to August 2017 (followed-up until February 2018).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The objective of this study was to describe the temporal relationship between an illicit drug market abrupt disruption and the number of discarded syringes collected from public space in Barcelona.
Methods: The monthly number of discarded syringes collected and interrupted time-series analyses were used to analyze changes and trends from January 2014 to December 2017, before and after an illicit drug market disruption comparing three different areas of the city: intervened (A) and not intervened (B) high trafficking areas and, as a reference, a low trafficking area (C).
Results: After the disruption, a decrease in the average number of syringes collected in area A was observed, although the trend was not significant (p value 0.
Background: The opening hours of drug consumption rooms could constitute a barrier to access among people who use drugs (PWUD). CAS Baluard is an outpatient substance use care center in Barcelona, which provides a drug consumption room in Barcelona among other services. The objectives of our study were to compare the client profile, the facility use, the drugs used, and the number of non-fatal overdose episodes between (1) a 15-hour opening period of a drug consumption room versus a 24-hour opening period; and (2) between daytime and nighttime during the 24-hour period.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Integrated care programmes are increasingly being put in place to provide care to older people who live at home. Knowledge of how to further develop integrated care and how to transfer successful initiatives to other contexts is still limited. Therefore, a cross-European research project, called Sustainable Tailored Integrated Care for Older People in Europe (SUSTAIN), has been initiated with a twofold objective: 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Epidemiol Community Health
January 2015
Background: There is increasing interest on whether the current global economic uncertainties have an influence on the population's mental health. In this paper, we examined the association of negative socioeconomic changes, job loss and household income reductions with incident mental disorders. The moderating effect of gender was assessed.
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