This news release is available only to verified logged-in journalists until the embargo expires on 8/12/2024 5:00:00 PM. Professional journalists may apply for a PressPass to access embargoed stories.
Tag: user_id 13800
Curious by Nature: How Addictive Are Companies Making Video Games with Dr. Puneet Manchanda
Newswise — For many years, addiction research has focused on chemical dependencies like drugs and alcohol. However, new phenomena such as video game and social media addictions are not as extensively studied.
Dr. Puneet Manchanda from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business dives into the world of modern addiction. He talks about his research on how these technologies impact us and what steps can help prevent addiction.
The latest episode of the Curious by Nature podcast, titled “How Addictive Are Companies Making Video Games” featuring Dr. Puneet Manchanda, is now available on Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Curious by Nature, presented by Newswise, is a podcast for curious people. In each episode, listeners can travel briefly into the fascinating world that comes with years of dedication to one field of study. Be inspired by the many amazing things that are going on right now, some of which may have a major effect on our lives. Enjoy this concentrated knowledge from experts. We hope you can take inspiration from glimpses of innovation, dedication, and discovery.
Follow us!
Spotify Podcast: https://spoti.fi/
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4copuPI
Study: Gaming Opens Pathways into it Careers
Newswise — If you’re worried that your kids are wasting too much of their summer playing video games, there could be an unexpected payoff in the future.
A new study by the Rutgers Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) reveals that gaming, modding, and related hobbies can form a career pathway into the high-demand IT field, especially for adolescents and teens with supportive parents.
“Students don’t realize it at first, but playing video games and having related hobbies is often really helpful when choosing a career and even while job hunting,” said Rutgers EERC Research Analyst Eliza Peterson, the lead author of the study. “For example, if they’re hosting a Minecraft server for their friends, they could parlay those skills and lessons into a Server Administration major, and later, maybe a career in that area of IT.”
As part of a larger study supported by the National Science Foundation, Rutgers researchers interviewed 43 students and alumni of the Ivy Tech Community College School of Information Technology in Indiana. The interviews, conducted over three years, revealed a common trajectory.
Most participants became interested in technology at a young age, often while bonding with their parents, and more than half of them (26 of 43) eventually developed a hobby such as gaming, modifying games (modding), coding, programming, or building computers.
As teens, they did not expect that their passion for playing Minecraft or Fortnite could eventually lead to a job. But they eventually had a revelation – what the researchers call the “hobby-to-career reckoning” – and decided to study IT in their community college.
“I realized I have a lot of fun doing this,” said one gamer who decided to change majors. “I made the switch because I realized that I felt like everyone was pushing me to [study] business. But what I really enjoyed was learning programming.”
One alumnus, now a software engineer at J.P. Morgan, described how his coding hobby prepared him for the complexities of handling IT at a large financial institution: “That’s kind of where I shine, because the sort of sloppy hobbyist coder in me has been doing that all my life.”
A recent Pew Research Center study finds that 85% of American teens play video games, and 41% play them at least once a day. Studies have shown that gaming can improve cognitive function and memory, while helping gamers to develop important soft skills.
The Rutgers study adds to this growing body of work by highlighting a pathway from the thumb-cramping World of Warcraft into the lucrative world of IT work.
There are nearly 4.5 million computer and information technology professionals in the U.S., earning a median annual wage of $104,420, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s more than double the median annual wage for all occupations ($48,060).
More than 377,000 computer and IT job openings are expected each year, and overall employment is projected to grow “much faster” than the average for other occupations by 2032, including 25% growth for software developers and 32% for information security analysts.
Many of those future IT professionals could be playing Roblox or Brawl Stars today. But the Rutgers study notes there are several obstacles on the journey from hobby to career.
An estimated 42 million Americans lack broadband internet access, disproportionately affecting low-income families. This “digital divide” may prevent some students from developing an interest in the IT field. In addition, parental skepticism can deter some students from pursuing their passion.
While many of the participants felt supported in their decision to study IT, others were met with resistance at home. One first-generation student told the researchers that his family “didn’t get it” and urged him to enter a different field, but he pushed forward and earned an associate degree in software development.
“If you’re a parent or educator, I would encourage you to reframe the way you think about gaming,” Peterson said. “The gamers in your life could be gaining useful – and potentially lucrative – skills through these hobbies. In fact, you may even want to foster these hobbies further, and help them to see, ‘Hey, I could use this later on in life, in school or at work.’”
So the next time your teen turns on the PS5, perhaps think of it as employment training.
About the Study
Not “Just a Hobby”: The Influence of Early Interest and Hobbies on Community College IT Student Decision-Making by Eliza Peterson, Michelle Van Noy, Sam Scovill, and Renee Edwards appears in the Journal of Advanced Technical Education.
About Us
The Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) is the world’s leading source of expertise on managing and representing workers, designing effective organizations, and building strong employment relationships.
SMLR’s Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) strives to improve education and training to ensure students and workers are prepared to be successful in today’s workforce.
Prescription painkiller misuse and addiction are widespread in chronic pain patients
Newswise — A new scientific review of 148 studies enrolling over 4.3 million adult chronic pain patients treated with prescription opioid painkillers has found that nearly one in ten patients experiences opioid dependence or opioid use disorder and nearly one in three shows symptoms of dependence and opioid use disorder. This University of Bristol-led study, published in Addiction, provides a more accurate — and more concerning — rate of opioid misuse than has previously been calculated.
Companies like Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma have claimed that fewer than 1% of opioid prescriptions result in problems for patients. This new review, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), makes clear that such claims greatly understate the risk of opioid misuse and addiction.
The researchers divided the 148 studies into four general categories, depending on how the studies defined problematic opioid use:
- dependence and opioid use disorder: 43 studies that identified problematic opioid use through diagnostic codes (formal diagnoses using precise definitions);
- signs and symptoms of dependence and opioid use disorder: 44 studies that looked for behaviours indicating dependence and opioid use disorder, such as craving, tolerance, or withdrawal, without use of specific diagnostic codes;
- aberrant behaviour: 76 studies that looked for inappropriate or concerning behaviour, such as seeking early refills, repeated dose escalations, or frequently lost prescriptions; and
- at risk of dependence and opioid use disorder: 8 studies that looked for characteristics that might increase the risk of developing opioid dependence or opioid use disorder in the future; however, the characteristics do not fall within previous categories of aberrant behaviour or dependence and opioid use disorder.
Some studies reported multiple results within the same participants using different measurement criteria, so the sum of the number of studies in each category equals more than 148. The prevalence (frequency) of problematic opioid use for each category was:
- Dependence and opioid use disorder: 3%, or nearly 1 in 10 patients.
- Signs and symptoms of dependence and opioid use disorder: 6%, nearly 1 in 3 patients.
- Aberrant behaviour: 22%, more than 1 in 5 patients.
- At risk of dependence and opioid use disorder: 4%, nearly 1 in 8 patients.
Lead author Kyla Thomas, Professor of Public Health Medicine at the University of Bristol, explained: “Clinicians and policy makers need a more accurate estimate of the prevalence of problematic opioid use in pain patients so that they can gauge the true extent of the problem, change prescribing guidance if necessary, and develop and implement effective interventions to manage the problem. Knowing the size of the problem is a necessary step to managing it.”
The studies in this review were predominantly from North American research and high-income countries. One hundred and six of the 148 studies were conducted between 2010 and 2021; the oldest study was from 1985. Study size ranged from 15 to 2,304,181 patients. Due to the high heterogeneity of the studies, these findings should be interpreted with caution.
Paper
‘Prevalence of problematic pharmaceutical opioid use in patients with chronic non-cancer pain: A systematic review and meta-analysis’ by Kyla H. Thomas et al. in Addiction
Fentanyl May Increase or Decrease Oxygen Levels Depending on Dosage
Original post: Newswise - Substance Abuse Fentanyl May Increase or Decrease Oxygen Levels Depending on Dosage
Newswise — Article title: Oxygen fluctuations in the brain and periphery induced by intravenous fentanyl: effects of dose and drug experience
Authors: Shinbe Choi, Michael R. Noya, Eugene A. Kiyatkin
From the authors: “We report that fentanyl’s effects are highly dose-dependent, drawing attention to the importance of better characterization to adequately respond in emergent cases of illicit fentanyl misuse.”
This study is highlighted as one of August’s “best of the best” as part of the American Physiological Society’s APSselect program.
Your Best Friend From High School? Here’s Why Their Genes Mattered
Original post: Newswise - Substance Abuse Your Best Friend From High School? Here's Why Their Genes Mattered
BYLINE: Greg Bruno
Newswise — Mom always said, “Choose your friends wisely.” Now a study led by a Rutgers Health professor shows she was onto something: Their traits can rub off on you – especially ones that are in their genes.
The genetic makeup of adolescent peers may have long-term consequences for individual risk of drug and alcohol use disorders, depression and anxiety, the groundbreaking study has found.
“Peers’ genetic predispositions for psychiatric and substance use disorders are associated with an individual’s own risk of developing the same disorders in young adulthood,” said Jessica E. Salvatore, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and lead author of the study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. “What our data exemplifies is the long reach of social genetic effects,” Salvatore said.
Socio-genomics – the influence of one person’s genotype on the observable traits of another – is an emerging field of genomics. Research suggests that peers’ genetic makeup may influence health outcomes of their friends. To test this, Salvatore and colleagues used Swedish national data to assess peer social genetic effects for several psychiatric disorders.
With an anonymized database of more than 1.5 million individuals born in Sweden between 1980 and 1998 to Swedish-born parents, the first step was to map individuals by location and by school during their teenage years. The researchers then used medical, pharmacy and legal registries documenting substance use and mental health disorders for the same individuals in adulthood.
Models were run to assess whether peers’ genetic predispositions predicted target individuals’ likelihood of experiencing substance abuse, major depression, and anxiety disorder in adulthood. Peers’ genetic predispositions were indexed with family genetic risk scores – personalized measures of genetic risk based on family history – for the same conditions.
Even when controlling for factors such as the target individuals’ own genetic predispositions and family socioeconomic factors, the researchers found a clear association between peers’ genetic predispositions and target individuals’ likelihood of developing a substance use or psychiatric disorder. The effects were stronger among school-based peers than geographically defined peers.
Within school groups, the strongest effects were among upper secondary school classmates, particularly those in the same vocational or college-preparatory track between ages 16 and 19. Social genetic effects for school-based peers were greater for drug and alcohol use disorders than major depression and anxiety disorder.
Salvatore said more research is needed to understand why these connections exist.
“The most obvious explanation for why peers’ genetic predispositions might be associated with our own well-being is the idea our peers’ genetic predispositions influence their phenotype, or the likelihood that peers are also affected by the disorder,” she said. “But in our analysis, we found that peers’ genetic predispositions were associated with target individuals’ likelihood of disorder even after we statistically controlled for whether peers were affected or unaffected.”
What is clear, Salvatore said, is what the findings mean for interventions.
“If we want to think about how to best address these socially costly disorders, we need to think more about network based and social interventions,” she said. “It’s not enough to think about individual risk.”
This research also underscores the importance of disrupting processes and risks that extend for at least a decade after attendance in school, Salvatore added. “Peer genetic influences have a very long reach,” she said.
Coauthors include Henrik Ohlsson, Jan Sundquist and Kristina Sundquist, from Lund University in Sweden; and Kenneth S. Kendler from the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University.
What Happens to Your Brain When You Drink with Friends?
Newswise — EL PASO, Texas (Aug. 6, 2024) – Grab a drink with friends at happy hour and you’re likely to feel chatty, friendly and upbeat. But grab a drink alone and you may experience feelings of depression. Researchers think they now know why this happens.
“Social settings influence how individuals react to alcohol, yet there is no mechanistic study on how and why this occurs,” said Kyung-An Han, Ph.D., a biologist at The University of Texas at El Paso who uses fruit flies to study alcoholism.
Now, Han and a team of UTEP faculty and students have taken a key step in understanding the neurobiological process behind social drinking and how it boosts feelings of euphoria. Their new study, published in a recent issue of the journal Addiction Biology, pinpoints the region of the brain that is stimulated by social drinking and may lead to a better understanding of how humans become vulnerable to Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), a disease that affected nearly 29.5 million people just this past year, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Turns out that tipsy fruit flies aren’t that different from intoxicated humans. Although they might seem like an unconventional choice from which to derive knowledge about human behavior, these insects share about 75% of the same genes that cause human diseases, Han explained.
Using fruit flies, Han and her team sought to demonstrate that ethanol, the alcohol in drinks, causes different reactions in solitary versus group settings and that dopamine, the brain molecule that plays a role in pleasure, motivation and learning, is a key player for this phenomenon.
The team’s experiments consisted of exposing fruit flies, either alone or in a group setting, to ethanol vapor and measuring their average speed to determine the degree of ethanol-induced response. While flies who “drank alone” displayed a slight increase in movement, flies exposed to ethanol in a group setting displayed significantly increased speed and movement.
The team then proceeded to test whether dopamine plays a role in the flies’ response to ethanol, comparing a control group whose dopamine was naturally regulated by the brain with an experimental group that had increased levels of dopamine.
The team found that the flies, regardless of whether they had normal or increased levels of dopamine, had a similar reaction to ethanol in a solitary setting — a tiny increase in activity. But in social settings, the flies with increased dopamine showed even more heightened hyperactivity than usual.
“We demonstrated that both social settings and dopamine act together for the flies’ heightened response to ethanol,” said Han who currently serves as associate dean in the College of Science.
The team’s final task was to identify which of the five dopamine receptors in the brain is the largest contributor in this process and found that the D1 dopamine receptor was most important to flies’ reaction to ethanol in a social setting.
“The human D1 receptor gene is linked to Alcohol Use Disorder and this study provides experimental validation for it. For the team, the identification of the D1 receptor is crucial as it gives researchers at UTEP and beyond a blueprint for follow up studies,” Han explained.
“Our work is providing scientific knowledge to support the idea that the brain interprets and processes a person’s social surrounding and has that signal converge into the dopamine system that is also activated by alcohol consumption,” said Paul Rafael Sabandal, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in biological sciences and one of the study’s corresponding authors. “It gives us as researchers an idea of which brain area and components may serve as the meeting point for all the signals that contribute to AUD.”
The team’s next step is to explore the intricacies by which the D1 dopamine receptor serves as the nexus point for the signals that contribute to the ethanol, social interaction and AUD.
Han said, “The opportunity to work on projects whose positive impact can be applied at scale is one of the reasons I became a scientist. It’s humbling to know that our work has the potential to help people live better lives and our team is going to continue striving toward achieving that goal.”
Additional study authors are former UTEP undergraduates Dilean Murillo Gonzalez and Bryan Hernandez Granados, who are now at the Baylor College of Medicine Neuroscience Graduate Program and the Vanderbilt University Postbaccalaureate Program, respectively.
The research was funded by UTEP’s Orville Edward Egbert, M.D. Endowment fund.
About The University of Texas at El Paso
The University of Texas at El Paso is America’s leading Hispanic-serving university. Located at the westernmost tip of Texas, where three states and two countries converge along the Rio Grande, 84% of our 24,000 students are Hispanic, and more than half are the first in their families to go to college. UTEP offers 170 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs at the only open-access, top-tier research university in America.
Last decade saw big decrease in teens who used commonly prescribed and misused prescription drugs
Newswise — Since 2009, U.S. high school seniors have reported steep declines in medical use, misuse and availability of the three most commonly prescribed and misused controlled substances for teens, a new University of Michigan study found.
Researchers compared use trends, sources and perceived availability of opioids, stimulants and benzodiazepines from 2009 to 2022. The research letter detailing the findings is scheduled to appear July 24 in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“To put these findings in context, the reduction over the past decade was like going from 1 in every 9 high school students using prescription drugs nonmedically down to 1 in every 40 high school students,” said Sean Esteban McCabe, U-M professor of nursing and director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health.
“While this decrease is encouraging, we need to be vigilant because any amount of nonmedical use poses risks, especially with the danger posed by counterfeit pills.”
Other findings from 2009 through 2022:
- Lifetime medical use decreased from 24% to 16%.
- Past-year misuse declined from 11% to 2%.
- The percentage of adolescents who reported being given prescription medications by friends or buying them from friends, both fell by more than half.
- In 2009, adolescents who reported misusing prescription medications said the most common source was friends. Now, it is one’s own prescription (37%).
- Among adolescents who reported misuse, those with multiple sources for obtaining prescription medications dropped from 56% to 29%.
- Perceived difficulty of obtaining prescription medications for misuse declined across the three drug classes.
- The percentage of adolescents who reported that they thought it would be impossible to get prescription drugs for misuse increased from 36% to 49%.
School closures during COVID accounted for the largest changes because students had limited contact with each other, and opportunities to sell or give away prescription drugs to friends declined, McCabe said.
Study co-author Philip Veliz, research associate professor of nursing, said the declines may be partially due to changes in prescribing practices, especially for opioids. The study did not examine specific trends based on drug class.
“Prescribing practices have changed dramatically because we had an opioid epidemic, which turned into a heroin epidemic, and we’re still reeling from that, especially with fentanyl,” Veliz said. “A lot of this also has to do with parents having better knowledge and oversight of these medications.”
The steep decline in teens who misused prescription medications in the past year, from 11% to 2%, surprised researchers.
“That’s a massive decline. It used to be 1 in 9 kids, now it’s an incredibly rare event at this point,” Veliz said. “The second surprise was that … nearly half of kids say it’s probably impossible to get these drugs if they want to use them nonmedically right now. That’s a big chunk of the adolescent population, and this is just off the table.”
Another surprise is that the landscape has not returned to what it looked like before COVID, McCabe said.
“Adolescents have found it more difficult to obtain prescription stimulants for nonmedical use in recent years, which is a positive sign,” he said. “There needs to be more attention on stimulant use and diversion, and our team is currently working on such studies to help inform clinical guidelines for ADHD and stimulant use disorder.”
This study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and used data from 12th grade students collected in 2009 through 2022 from the Monitoring the Future study, an annual survey at University of Michigan that tracks student substance use and other related trends.
Co-authors include: Emily Pasman, Tim Wilens, Ty Schepis, Vita McCabe and Jason Ford.
Study: Adolescent use, diversion sources, and perceived difficulty of obtaining prescription medications (DOI: 10.1001/jama.2024.12030)
Opioid Crisis Escalates in Appalachia: Rural Areas Hit Hardest, Study Finds
Original post: Newswise - Substance Abuse Opioid Crisis Escalates in Appalachia: Rural Areas Hit Hardest, Study Finds
Newswise — A recent study reveals a troubling surge in opioid-related deaths across the Appalachian region, with rural areas suffering the highest rates. From 2018 to 2021, opioid-related fatalities steadily climbed in urban, suburban, and rural counties, underscoring an urgent call for targeted interventions and healthcare reforms to combat the epidemic’s devastating impact on these communities.
The study titled “Differences in Opioid-Related Deaths in the Appalachian Region in 2018-2021 by State and Rural-Urban County Classification” examines opioid-related death rates across different county classifications (urban, suburban, rural) within the Appalachian region from 2018 to 2021. The study was organized and funded by the Rothman Opioid Foundation. The study focuses on understanding how these death rates vary by geographic and demographic factors. Opioid-related deaths, on average and by population, have risen steadily in the Appalachian region from 2018 to 2021 across all geographic areas (urban/metropolitan, suburban, rural). Rural counties consistently showed the highest opioid-related deaths per population compared to urban/metropolitan and suburban areas.
“The results emphasize the need for targeted community and health system interventions to address the disproportionately high rate of opioid prescribing and deaths in the Appalachian region,” says Dr. Asif Iliyas, co-author of the study. He is President of The Rothman Institute Foundation for Opioid Research and Education (Rothman Opioid Foundation) in Philadelphia, a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Thomas Jefferson University, and an Associate Dean of Clinical Research at the Drexel University College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.
Santiago Rengifo, Alice Wu, and Patrick Ioffreda are co-authors of the study. The complete study can be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10349683/.
About the Rothman Institute Foundation for Opioid Research and Education.
The Rothman Orthopaedic Foundation, for short, is a non-profit 501c3 organization dedicated to raising awareness of the ongoing opioid crisis, educating physicians and patients on safe opioid prescribing and use – respectively, and advising policymakers on sound opioid and pain management policy. Most importantly, the Rothman Opioid Foundation performs and supports the highest quality research on opioids and alternative pain modalities to yield findings that can better inform patients, physicians, and the greater healthcare community in the most evidenced-based pain management strategies while working to mitigate opioid abuse and addiction.
Research Highlights Tiktok as Tool in Opioid Harm Reduction
Original post: Newswise - Substance Abuse Research Highlights Tiktok as Tool in Opioid Harm Reduction
BYLINE: Deann Gayman
Newswise — Welcome to Pocket Science: a glimpse at recent research from Husker scientists and engineers. For those who want to quickly learn the “What,” “So what” and “Now what” of Husker research.
What?
With fatal opioid overdoses continuing to increase each year, the Federal Drug Administration in 2023 made Narcan — the brand name for naloxone in nasal spray form — available over the counter, but recent polling shows that most Americans still aren’t aware they can access it without a prescription.
Additionally, TikTok’s popularity as a tool for searching out and disseminating health information is growing. A 2022 study found that 20% of Americans now turn to TikTok before their doctors to answer health questions. Content creators with a goal of harm reduction have increasingly used the platform to educate users about naloxone, a life-saving drug that can reverse an opioid overdose.
So what?
Led by Kelli Boling, assistant professor of advertising at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, a group of researchers from the College of Journalism and Mass Communications and the Center for Rural Drug Addiction recently published a study examining the role of TikTok creators in promoting naloxone.
Utilizing the hashtags #narcansaveslives and #naloxonesaveslives to search TikTok, the researchers found more than 900 videos and randomly selected 100 videos to be analyzed. The timing of the videos was also important. The search was limited to a specific time period — June 5, 2020, to Oct. 4, 2022 — during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when opioid deaths were increasing and Americans were spending more time online. The videos were coded for visuals, audio and transcribed voice text, as well as text included on the screen and in captions, and hashtags.
The most consistent theme of the videos was education, with four sub-themes: the prevalence of the opioid epidemic; how to access and use Narcan/naloxone; correcting misinformation; and discussion about the disease of substance use disorder and reality of recovery.
The researchers also noted that there was a strong “collective voice” among the harm reduction creators and that the collective voice and collective lived experiences shared “are also de-stigmatizing opioid harm reduction and sharing resources and information helpful to others.”
Now what?
The study demonstrated the important role TikTok can play in harm reduction education. Future research could examine how this content changes audience attitudes toward naloxone and whether it leads to more people carrying naloxone as a harm reduction tool.