View clinical trials related to Alcohol Dependency.
Filter by:An alcohol Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) approach will be adapted for use in a large military hospital setting, and then pilot tested in a military emergency department (ED) to assess its potential for effectiveness and for further testing in a large-scale trial. SBIRT is an "opportunistic" approach whereby all adult patients in the ED are screened by Health Educators for their alcohol use, and then, taking advantage of a "teachable moment," are delivered a brief, motivational intervention matched to their level of risk. The feasibility/formative research activities in the first phase (Phase I) of the study are not summative research, and therefore, do not lend themselves to testable hypotheses. Hypotheses with regard to the pilot randomized trial in Phase II are as follows: 1. Participants in the SBIRT intervention will show relatively greater reductions over a six month period (or less increase) than the brochure/usual care control group in the prevalence of past-month heavy drinking, frequency of heavy drinking, past week number of drinks, and the AUDIT-based drinkers' index. 2. Alcohol use-related motivation/readiness to change and controlled drinking self-efficacy will show greater change in the SBIRT intervention group relative to the brochure/usual care control group. In addition, exploratory analyses will examine the following: 3. Sociodemographic/military variables (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, gender, branch of service, officer/enlisted status, PTS) and social-psychological factors (e.g., baseline readiness to change, self efficacy) will mediate or moderate changes in alcohol misuse.
Relapse is a major risk in substance abuse disorders, which is closely related to craving for a substance, describing a strong urge for consumption. Cue-exposure therapy is an intervention aiming at the reduction of perceived craving by repeated confrontation. It is based on the assumption that craving drops after repeated exposure without the reinforcing experience elicited by consumption. In the present study, patients with alcohol dependency take part in nine cue-exposure training sessions. Each session consists of mood induction reflecting a high risk situation with subsequent in vivo confrontation with one's preferred alcoholic beverage followed by the training of coping strategies. During the cue-exposure, patients focus on perceiving automatic responses to alcohol-related cues. We hypothesize that especially patients exhibiting initially high reactions to such cues should profit from this intervention the most. The reactions are measured on a subjective (craving) and physiological level (hemodynamics of the prefrontal cortex, heart rate variability, electrodermal activity). Furthermore, we want to strengthen the expected training effects during the cue-exposure by an activating transcranial direct current stimulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which has been shown to be hypoactive in substance abuse disorders. We investigate how the cue-exposure training affects the processing of alcoholic cues (cue-reactivity) and its relation to clinical symptoms of alcohol dependency.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the Relay Model helping alcohol dependent patients at a general hospital to start specialized alcohol treatment in order to assess i) efficacy, ii) cost-effectiveness and iii) overall societal cost impacts. The effect of the Relay Model will be investigated in a single-blind pragmatic randomised controlled trial in which the control group consists of patients referred to treatment by usual procedures.