Emerging trends in drugs, addictions, and health最新文献

Background and aims

Novel synthetic opioids’ use has been increasing over the last decade and the opioid epidemic has attributed to 70 % of drug-related deaths worldwide. Lately, Twitter has become one of the key social media platforms where the public express their unfiltered and honest views and opinions anonymously and freely.

Methodology

This research comprised a qualitative study that explored the motivations, effects and toxicity of novel synthetic opioids from the perspectives of Tweeters. Tweets were extracted using NVivo 12 Pro by using the Chrome NCapture where thematic content analysis was applied. Extracted data from relevant tweets were coded into subthemes and themes.

Findings

Five main themes were found related to uses of opioids; public knowledge and attitude, desired effects, adverse events, and harm reduction strategies. For public knowledge and attitude, users reported about sources of opioids, as well as purity, addiction potential and lethal effects. The main uses of opioids included self-medication and for recreational purposes. For self-medications, users sought opioids against anxiety, depression, pain, and overcoming a previous opioid addiction. However, adverse events related to opioid use surpassed the desired effects and were: psychosis, addiction, withdrawal, respiratory depression and lethal effects. Most of the adverse events were linked to novel opioids rather than classical ones.

Conclusions

Twitter provided a valuable source of information regarding opioids’ modalities of use, desired effects and adverse events. These findings benefit practitioners and healthcare professionals dealing with opioid users.

This study examined social media conversations and people's attitudes and perceptions in the United States about the COVID-19 vaccine from January and February 2021. A total of 1,050 tweets were content analyzed (N = 1,050) (January 2021: n = 550, February 2021: n = 500). Research was also gathered from college students at a medium-sized college in the northeast during those two months using an online survey with a sample size of 171 (N = 171).

It was found that more tweets in January had negative sentiment than in February, whereas tweets in February had more positive sentiment than in January. Although half of the tweets did not address vaccine risk, the other half identified various risks. Tweets in January included more blaming of government and individuals than tweets in February. Regarding hazard and outrage, more tweets in January expressed low hazard and high outrage than tweets in February, though more tweets in February showed low hazard and low outrage than those in January. Finally, tweets in January contained more liberal and conservative frames than tweets in February.

The survey data show that people held positive attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine. Participants’ risk perception about the vaccine was low. They also rated the vaccine as highly effective. Participants noted COVID-19 being a high threat. People's concern with COVID-19 was moderately high. They also took highly active behavior to protect themselves from COVID-19. Participants showed relatively low levels of outrage toward COVID-19 vaccines. The majority of participants had family members and friends who received the vaccine. Survey participants with family members who had been infected with COVID-19 had more belief in the effectiveness of the vaccine than people whose family members had not been infected.

These findings can be invaluable to public health officials in better understanding perceptions of the COVID-19 vaccine and risk.

With the rise of the experience economy, visitor experiences and feedback have become central to improving museum services. To enhance their appeal, understanding visitors' real experiences is key. This study, based on online reviews of museums in Jiangxi Province from April 2020 to May 2023 on platforms like Dianping and Ctrip, employs high-frequency keyword analysis, topic analysis, semantic networks, and sentiment analysis to deeply explore visitors' offline experiences. While most visitors provided positive feedback, criticisms were also raised concerning exhibit content, service attitude, and interactive programs. These online feedbacks offer valuable insights, aiding us in understanding and enhancing the offline service experience in museums. This research provides a unique perspective for other museums and cultural institutions, aiming to optimize offline visitor experiences through online social media trends.

Substance use problems among the homeless population represents a major issue leading to increased morbidity and mortality. The aim of this review was to investigate the prevalence, trends and effects of substance use among the homeless population. Studies were identified through electronic searches of Google Scholar, Science Direct, Medline, Embase and Scopus between January 2007 and December 2020. Studies included were those reporting substance use and homelessness within the age range of 18–64 years old, whereas interventional and rehabilitation studies were excluded. Subsequently the extraction yielded twenty-five studies. The results showed that substance use was more prevalent in males than females and alcohol the most popular substance used among the homeless population. After 2017, however, both alcohol and new psychoactive substances (NPS) were equally a problem. This urges the need to develop research in homelessness and NPS consumption to increase awareness among health care providers, governmental agencies and academics.

Background

Gaming is one of the most common leisure activities among children and adolescents: virtually every child in Sweden plays some form of internet games. However, concerns have been raised regarding the risk of developing psychiatric disorders such as internet gaming disorder. A significant amount of research has been focused on evaluating hours spent gaming and the negative effect the activity has on children's lives, but few studies have focused on children's self-evaluation of their gaming and their perception of good and bad gaming habits.

Aims

The first aim of this exploratory study was to describe children's and adolescents’ self-evaluation of their gaming habits. Secondly, we investigated how children and adolescents perceive their parents’ involvement in gaming, and whether this has any effect on their own, self-reported gaming habits.

Methods

Children and adolescents aged 9–15 (N = 541) attending public schools in Malmö, Sweden completed a digital survey. The data were collected between October 26 and December 3, 2021.

Results

Two variables emerged as significant predictors of wanting help with reducing gaming: younger age and classification as an excessive gamer. Four variables emerged as significant predictors of wanting to game more: being a girl; being classified as an immediate gamer; having ever had arguments with their parents about gaming; and rating gaming as a highly valued activity.

Conclusion

Our findings contribute to the understanding of what factors influence children's and adolescents’ desire to either increase their time spent gaming or their willingness to get help regarding gaming behaviors. Overall, our findings may be used to guide further, more in-depth research in this domain.

Background

Mental health and well-being are significantly harmed by exposure to trauma, resulting in PTSD. The use of social media has increased Statista (2021) recently, but little is known about how exposure to trauma and the development of PTSD affect trust in social media.

Methods

This qualitative study examines how trauma exposure and the development of PTSD affected addiction in the community of military veterans diagnosed with PTSD using thematic narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews. A convenience sample of fifteen people from a social media support group for people with PTSD was interviewed, and five admitted to engaging in addictive information behaviors.

Results

Participants described experiencing fear and mistrust due to being overloaded with information on social media platforms. Additionally, many claimed that particular social media content caused them to have traumatic event triggers, which further damaged their trust in these sites. Participants who had a history of exposure to trauma and the development of PTSD also mentioned utilizing social media as a coping strategy to block out their symptoms. Nevertheless, This coping strategy frequently backfired as they became more dependent on social media and could not handle their symptoms.

Conclusion

Important ramifications flow from these findings for mental health providers who treat patients with trauma-related disorders. They emphasize the importance of mental health professionals addressing social media use issues as part of their treatment strategies for people with trauma-related disorders. Small sample sizes and reliance on self-reported data are two drawbacks. Larger samples and objective measures of social media use and addiction could be used in future studies to examine these findings further.

The present study investigated potential associations between tendencies towards social networks use disorder (SNUD) and smoking status/tobacco use disorder (TUD) tendencies. A final sample of n = 529 participants was recruited via an online survey, with the effective sample comprising n = 228 non-smokers, n = 54 ex-smokers, and n = 247 smokers. In this preregistered work, a significant association was observed between SNUD and smoking status. In detail, when running analysis without controlling for potential age and gender effects, smoking status was visibly linked to individual differences in SNUD scores: the smoking-group was associated with lowest SNUD scores. Further (and exclusive) analysis of the smoker-group revealed no significant associations between SNUD and TUD tendencies. Interestingly, exploratory analyses of the male and female smoker subsamples revealed a mild non-significant positive association between SNUD and TUD in males and a mild non-significant negative association between SNUD and TUD in females (the latter was a very small positive correlation after controlling for age though). In sum, the study revealed that associations between SNUD and TUD might exist, but the observed findings were not in line with the preregistration and need to be revisited by future studies in larger sample sizes.

Background and Aims

New psychoactive substances (NPS) pose challenges not only due to their harms to users but also because they are difficult to monitor with traditional epidemiologic methods. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) offers a reliable method to assess drug-taking habits in different geographical settings and their evolution over time. The aim of this systematic review was to examine NPS preferences and trends across Europe.

Methods

We searched electronic databases between September 5th to 30th, 2022, included OVID/Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Knowledge. Key search terms focused on NPS, WBE, prevalence, and geographic Europe. 18 articles were included in the systematic review. All studies were WBE studies, with 17 studies collecting samples from wastewater treatment plants, one collecting from pissoirs. Due to heterogeneity across studies, a meta-analysis was not performed.

Results

Literature reviewed in this study showed a trend towards stimulant-type NPS use, with the United Kingdom showing highest detection frequency. The most detected chemical class of NPS were synthetic cathinones. Southern and Western Europe showed the largest variety of NPS detected. Metabolite detection ranged extensively across countries.

Conclusion

This is the first systematic review to address types of new psychoactive substances present in wastewater in Europe. Gaps in literature point to a need for standardization in wastewater-based epidemiology so that drug policies and public health policies, including drug and harm reduction services, can be targeted to those NPS that are most widely used.