First-line opioid agonist treatment as prevention against assisting others in initiating injection drug use: A longitudinal cohort study of people who inject drugs in Vancouver, Canada.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Among people who inject drugs, frequent injecting and experiencing withdrawal are associated with facilitating others' first injections. As these factors may reflect an underlying substance use disorder, we investigated whether first-line oral opioid agonist treatment (OAT; methadone or buprenorphine/naloxone) reduces the likelihood that people who inject drugs help others initiate injecting.

Methods

We used questionnaire data from semi-annual visits between December 2014-May 2018 on 334 people who inject drugs with frequent non-medical opioid use in Vancouver, Canada. We estimated the effect of current first-line OAT on subsequent injection initiation assistance provision (i.e., helped someone initiate injecting in the following six months) using inverse-probabil

SUBMITTER: Bouck Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10311194 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature