Female crack cocaine users under treatment at therapeutic communities in southern Brazil: characteristics, pattern of consumption, and psychiatric comorbidities

Abstract

Objective To explore and describe sociodemographic characteristics, crack consumption patterns, and psychiatric comorbidities of female crack users receiving treatment at therapeutic communities. Methods This was a cross-sectional, descriptive, quantitative study. Forty-six women who abstained from crack use were assessed using a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID-I), and a profile of crack use questionnaire. Descriptive statistical analyses were conducted. Results Participants had a mean age of 31.02 years (standard deviation [SD] = 7.73), most were single (76.1%), white (67.4%) and had complete or incomplete elementary education (43.5%). Before treatment, 65.2% of the women reported using crack every day; 46.3% smoked between 10 to 30 crack rocks per week. Mean treatment time was 63.56 days (SD = 75.85), with a mean of 80.41 days of abstinence (SD = 74.52) and 3.37 previous treatments (SD = 5.49). Mean age upon crack use initiation was 22.61 years (SD = 8.06), and the most frequent motivation to start using crack was curiosity (78.3%). The mean lifetime duration of crack use was 82.26 months (SD = 74.76), and the physical complications most frequently reported were weight loss (93.5%), followed by sleep problems (87%). In this study, the most prevalent psychiatric diagnoses were major depressive episode (60.87%), followed by post-traumatic stress disorder (52.17%) and generalized anxiety disorder (13.07%). Conclusions Overall, a pattern of high consumption of crack was observed. The results show a high frequency of mood and anxiety disorders, with the highest frequencies found for major depressive episode and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Psychosocial factors related to dropout in substance use disorder inpatient treatment: a longitudinal study

“…Hess and collaborators (2019) carried out a study to observe the social characteristics correlated with the number and length of stay of women in prolonged inpatient treatment. No difference was seen in respect of the factors of age, race, education, and criminal history (Hess;De Almeida, 2019). Our data agree with these findings, as we did not observe a relationship between these sociodemographic factors and treatment dropout.…”

Plasma Lysophosphatidic Acid Concentrations in Sex Differences and Psychiatric Comorbidity in Patients with Cocaine Use Disorder

“…On the other hand, CUD patients usually display a high prevalence of psychiatric comorbidities associated with other substance use disorders and other mental disorders. Our results indicate that mood, anxiety and personality disorders as well as alcohol and cannabis use disorders were the most frequent among abstinent CUD patients, as many other studies have reported [9,13,[56][57][58][59]. Regarding its association with sex-based differences, in our study, women began using cocaine later and exhibited higher rates of anxiety and eating disorders, whereas men showed more cannabis use disorders.…”

“…In the same line, previous studies have suggested that women suffer more with generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia and bulimia, which may be considered risk factors for the development of CUD. In contrast, men are more likely to develop other substance use disorders-except for sedatives [6,16,59]. Thus, alcohol use has been biologically demonstrated to increase the risk of compulsive cocaine consumption [60].…”

“…Mice lacking the LPA 1 receptor display augmented activation of the limbic system, exhibiting increased anhedonic behavior, hypoactivity, stress reactivity and anxiety responses [33,66]. In addition, this genotype shows reduced fear extinction, motivation and associative spatial memory compared with wild type mice [55,[59][60][61]. LPA 1 -null mice also show an altered adult neurogenesis and cell apoptosis in the hippocampus and cortical regions [33,63,66].…”