Publications by authors named "Wendy Slutske"

Binge drinking is a relatively common pattern of alcohol use among youth with normative frequency trajectories peaking in emerging and early adulthood. Frequent binge drinking is a critical risk factor for not only the development of alcohol use disorders (AUDs) but also increased odds of alcohol-related injury and death, and thus constitutes a significant public health concern. Changes in binge drinking across development are strongly associated with changes in impulsive personality traits (IPTs) which have been hypothesized as intermediate phenotypes associated with genetic risk for heavy alcohol use and AUD.

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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic was managed in part by the rapid development of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics including antiviral agents and advances in emergency airway and ventilatory management. The impact of these therapeutic advances on clinically pertinent metrics of emergency care have not been well-studied.

Methods: We abstracted data from emergency department (ED) visits made to 21 US health systems during the first two years of the pandemic, from February 1, 2020 to January 31, 2022.

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Background: Older adults are at higher risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 with comorbidities increasing such risk. Much less is known about the outcomes of young adults with COVID-19 despite their having had high infection rates.

Objectives: Our objective was to determine outcomes of hospitalized young adults with COVID-19 infection including rates of oxygen use, mortality, ICU admission, intubation, duration of hospitalization, and factors associated with adverse outcomes.

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Article Synopsis
  • COVID-19 has significantly affected global health, but most studies on dementia's impact during the pandemic have focused on Europe and Asia without differentiating dementia subtypes.
  • A study analyzing health records from 21 U.S. healthcare systems found that all-cause dementia was linked to higher mortality rates, while Alzheimer's and vascular dementia did not independently show this association.
  • Patients with any form of dementia had longer hospital stays and were less likely to be admitted to the ICU, indicating a unique set of health care challenges for these individuals during the pandemic.
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  • The study investigates the genetic links between aggression and alcohol use, specifically focusing on how these genetic factors may influence alcohol-related aggression differently.
  • Using polygenic risk scores (PRS) based on genome-wide data, the researchers analyzed the relationship between genetic risks and instances of alcohol-related aggression in two different groups: UCSF Family Alcoholism Study and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.
  • Results showed significant links between genetic risks for alcohol use disorder and aggression in the UCSF sample, but not in the Add Health sample, suggesting varying effects based on the context and type of aggression related to alcohol use.
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Patterns of association with externalizing and internalizing features differ across heroin use and prescription opioid misuse (POM). The present study examined whether heroin use and POM display differential etiologic overlap with symptoms of conduct disorder (CD), adult antisocial behavior (AAB), and major depressive episodes (MDEs), how aggregating heroin use and POM into a single phenotype may bias results, and explored potential sex differences. Seven thousand one hundred and sixty-four individual twins from the Australian Twin Registry (ATR; 59.

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Background: Only a small proportion of individuals who initiate nonmedical use of prescription opioids (NUPO) transition to heroin, suggesting that more nuanced aspects of NUPO may be better indicators of risk for escalating opioid use trajectories. This study leveraged panel data to identify NUPO typologies based on NUPO characteristics associated with opioid risk trajectories (route of administration, motives) and compared rates of heroin initiation at follow-up across typologies.

Methods: Latent class analyses were run among respondents with no history of heroin use from the Monitoring the Future Panel Study (base year N=10,408) at modal ages 18, 19/20, 21/22, 23/24, and 25/26.

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American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) individuals are more likely to die with COVID-19 than other groups, but there is limited empirical evidence to explain the cause of this inequity. The objective of this study was to determine whether medical comorbidities, area socioeconomic deprivation, or access to treatment can explain the greater COVID-19 related mortality among AI/AN individuals. The design was a retrospective cohort study of harmonized electronic health record data of all inpatients with COVID-19 from 21 United States health systems from February 2020 through January 2022.

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Identifying patients at risk for readmission after severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection could facilitate care planning and prevention. This retrospective cohort study of 60-day readmission included 105 543 COVID-19 patients at 21 US healthcare systems who were discharged alive between February 2020 and November 2021. Generalized linear mixed regression analyses tested predictors of 60-day readmission and severity.

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Article Synopsis
  • A study with 7,164 twins from the Australian Twin Registry explored the genetic and environmental influences on prescription opioid misuse (POM) and heroin use, revealing their differences.
  • The analysis used two models to partition the variance in drug use, showing that POM had significant drug-specific genetic influences, while heroin did not display any genetic variation specific to its use.
  • The findings suggest that the misuse of prescription medications relates to genetic factors that differ from those affecting heroin use, indicating a complex relationship between drug types and their misuse.
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Objective: Examine the nature of the relationship between adolescent polysubstance use and high school noncompletion.

Method: Among a sample of 9,579 adult Australian twins (58.63% female, = 30.

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It is vital to determine how patient characteristics that precede COVID-19 illness relate to COVID-19 mortality. This is a retrospective cohort study of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 across 21 healthcare systems in the US. All patients (N = 145,944) had COVID-19 diagnoses and/or positive PCR tests and completed their hospital stays from February 1, 2020 through January 31, 2022.

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Background: Prescription opioid misuse (POM) is often implicated in heroin initiation, despite evidence that POM does not predict heroin initiation any better than other drug use. Additionally, prescription misuse and illicit use behaviors tend to respectively "cluster" together. This study aimed to test a series of theory-driven factor models to explore how POM and heroin use are situated within the broader constellation of drug use that typically occurs alongside opioid (mis)use.

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Background: Despite its introduction into the diagnostic nomenclature over four decades ago, there remain large knowledge gaps about disordered gambling. The primary aims of the present study were to document the long-term course, childhood precursors, and adult life outcomes associated with disordered gambling.

Methods: Participants enrolled in the population-representative Dunedin Study were prospectively followed from birth through age 45.

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Genes associated with educational attainment may be related to or interact with adolescent alcohol, tobacco and cannabis use. Potential gene-environment interplay between educational attainment polygenic scores (EA-PGS) and adolescent alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis use was evaluated with a series of regression models fitted to data from a sample of 1871 adult Australian twins. All models controlled for age, age, cohort, sex and genetic ancestry as fixed effects, and a genetic relatedness matrix was included as a random effect.

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Main Objective: There is limited information on how patient outcomes have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study characterizes changes in mortality, intubation, and ICU admission rates during the first 20 months of the pandemic.

Study Design And Methods: University of Wisconsin researchers collected and harmonized electronic health record data from 1.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study analyzed data from over 104,000 COVID-19 patients to understand the impact of smoking status, nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), and vaccination on severe outcomes like death and ICU admission.
  • Both current and never smokers had similar outcomes, but former smokers experienced higher risks of death and ICU admission.
  • Current smokers receiving NRT had reduced mortality rates, and vaccination was more effective in lowering mortality for current and former smokers compared to never smokers.
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Background: There is mixed evidence about the relations of current versus past cancer with severe COVID-19 outcomes and how they vary by patient and cancer characteristics.

Methods: Electronic health record data of 104,590 adult hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were obtained from 21 United States health systems from February 2020 through September 2021. In-hospital mortality and ICU admission were predicted from current and past cancer diagnoses.

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Background And Aims: Previous studies have demonstrated associations between substance use and reduced educational attainment; however, many were unable to account for potential confounding factors like genetics and the rearing environment. In the few studies that controlled for these factors, the substances assessed were limited to alcohol, cannabis, and tobacco. To address these limitations, we examined the relationship between adolescent use of seven kinds of substances, the number of additional substances used, and high school noncompletion within a large sample of Australian twins.

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Objective: High neuroticism, low agreeableness, and low conscientiousness are consistent correlates of drug use, though such patterns may be due to common familial influences rather than effects of personality per se. The present study aimed to explore associations of Big Five traits with various forms of drug use independent of confounding familial influences by leveraging differences within twin pairs to identify potentially causal (i.e.

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Background And Aims: Previous research has demonstrated phenotypical associations between disordered gambling (DG) and Big 5 personality traits, and a twin study suggested that shared genetic influences accounted for a substantial portion of this relation. The present study examined associations between DG and polygenic scores (PSs) for Big 5 traits to measure the shared genetic underpinnings of Big 5 personality traits and DG.

Design: Zero-inflated negative binomial regression models estimated associations between Big 5 PSs and past-year and life-time assessments of DG in a longitudinally assessed population-based birth cohort.

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Background: The role of alcohol sensitivity in the experience of blacking out and passing out has not been well established. Here, we examined the relation between individual differences in alcohol sensitivity (i.e.

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The role of simultaneous alcohol and marijuana (SAM) use in the experience of blackouts among college students is unclear. To clarify discrepancies, the current study evaluated whether the association between SAM user status and blackouts was moderated by high-intensity drinking (HID). College students (N = 1,224; 63.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study identifies different categories of drug use based on substance type and frequency over time, highlighting five main groups: low/no use, desistant cannabis and party drug users, and two types of persistent drug misuse.
  • It uses a twin design to understand genetic influences on these categories, finding twin concordance rates higher in identical twins compared to fraternal twins, especially for persistent polydrug use, which is shown to be highly heritable.
  • The research also links various mental health issues, like conduct disorder and depression, as significant risk factors for persistent drug misuse, emphasizing the complex interplay between genetics and behavioral health in substance use.
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