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Tag: NIH
08/11/2021

A Yale Doctor Is Using a Video Game to Fight the Opioid Crisis

Article Excerpt: As drug-related deaths have spiked across the United States in recent years, doctors seeking to curb that surge are getting an unlikely new tool: a video game. The game, titled “PlaySmart,” was developed by Lynn Fiellin and funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. A professor at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Child Study Center, as well as the founder and director of the play2PREVENT video game development lab, Fiellin hopes that by using “PlaySmart,” she and her team will be able to collect more data related to adolescent opioid misuse and provide aid to both kids who play the game and the adults who work those youths.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/jt4k5r8b

Article Source: The Washington Post

08/03/2021

Digital Therapeutics for Substance Use Disorders: From Research to Practice

Article Excerpt: Over the last decade, and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic began, technology has been leveraged more than ever in medicine. The umbrella term “digital health” encompasses digital medicine (DM) and refers to all entities that engage lay individuals in wellness and health-related endeavors by collecting data.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/wvhzavxh

Article Source: Psychiatric Times

07/22/2021

Addiction Treatment Is Hard. A New Wave of Apps Aims to Help

Article Excerpt: This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a stunning report that showed drug overdose deaths shot up 30% in 2020. While the pandemic has led to increased distress among Americans, it’s also opened the door for innovation in certain aspects of mental healthcare, especially around addiction. Rehabilitation programs—ranging from 12-step programs to medication-assisted therapy—all went online. Now, a cadre of startups are thinking about how they can leverage the boom in telehealth to deliver better addiction care.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/tjue9mwc

Article Source: Fast Company

06/29/2021

NIH Starts Trial of Pear, Chess Apps for Opioid Use Disorder

Article Excerpt: Patient recruitment has begun in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) trial of two digital therapeutics (DTx) for people with opioid use disorder (OUD), developed by Pear Therapeutics and Chess Health. The CTN-0100 study is test strategies to help keep people with OUD on drug treatment, improve the chances that those stabilised with drug treatments for OUD can come off medication without relapsing, as well as to find ways to predict the risk of relapse based on patient characteristics. The study is testing various drug regimens along with Pear’s prescription app reSET-O and Chess Health’s free Connections app, given on top of standard medical management for OUD.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/efpbcj5a

Article Source: Pharmaphorum

05/21/2021

PlaySmart Completed Pilot Study, Trials / National Implementation Effort Start in Fall 2021

Article Excerpt: The newest game from the play2PREVENT (p2P) Lab at the Yale Center for Health & Learning Games, PlaySmart, concluded its pilot study in May 2021, and is preparing to start a randomized controlled trial in the fall of 2021 as well as work with their national implementation sites. Developed in partnership with the national School-Based Health Alliance and Schell Games, the PlaySmart game is aimed at preventing opioid misuse in teens, and was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the NIH HEAL Initiative in April 2018 to improve prevention and treatment strategies for opioid misuse and addiction and enhance pain management, and introduced a subsequent effort the following year to prevent opioid use disorder in adolescents.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/x73mp5yw

Article Source: Yale School of Medicine

05/07/2021

Rowan Psychology Professor Awarded NIH Grant for Smartphone-Based Smoking Cessation Intervention

Article Excerpt: Abstain from smoking, get virtual tokens to unlock your favorite apps. Puff away, and your smartphone applications stay locked. That’s the choice smokers attempting to quit will have when using Re-Connect, the smartphone-based smoking cessation intervention for which the National Institutes of Health awarded Dr. Bethany Raiff a three-year, $658,097grant. Raiff, a Rowan University professor of psychology and director of the Health and Behavioral Integrated Treatments (HABIT) Research Unit, has been working in behavioral health and smoking cessation for more than 15 years. Her research uses the principles of contingency management by applying an incentive—traditionally, money—to encourage the individual to give up smoking.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/y6wwrxzh

Article Source: Rowan University

04/20/2021

Dartmouth Startup Wins Funding for Remote Physical Therapy Monitoring System

Article Excerpt: “There’s a huge disparity in what clinicians and physical therapists think goes on in at-home rehabilitation programs and what actually happens,” said Principal Investigator Ryan Halter, professor of engineering and of surgery at Dartmouth, as well as co-founder of SynchroHealth, LLC, the company that was awarded the grant. “This disconnect often results in changes to the provider’s future treatment plans and could ultimately lead to unnecessary interventions that increase costs and potential risks to the patient. We’re aiming to close that gap.”

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/eet62bru

Article Source: Dartmouth Engineering. Also posted in NH Business Review.

01/22/2021

Using Big Data to Identify Genetic, Neural Bases for Substance Use Disorder

Article Excerpt: One of the challenges for researchers studying SUDs (substance use disorders) is that there might be different underlying mechanisms or pathways that cause someone to become addicted to a certain substance, and the specific neurological and genetic factors that account for heterogeneous clinical manifestation are poorly understood. Professor Jinbo Bi in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut has received a $1.7 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop machine learning algorithms to help identify SUD subcategories based on clinical, neuroimaging, and genetic data.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/y45pz376

Article Source: Mirage News

01/14/2021

A Medical Treatment For Meth Addiction Proves Effective In New Trial

Article Excerpt: For the first time, a medication regime has been found effective for some patients with meth addiction in a large, placebo-controlled trial. It’s welcome news for those working with the growing number of people struggling with meth addiction. “It’s progress and it’s quite significant,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Addiction, which funded the two-year clinical trial involving roughly 400 patients. The study was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Unlike opioid addiction, for which medication-assisted treatment is the standard of care, no medication has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use with meth.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/y34sx8qv

Article Source: NPR