Opioid agonist treatment scale-up and the initiation of injection drug use: A dynamic modeling analysis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Injection drug use (IDU) is associated with multiple health harms. The vast majority of IDU initiation events (in which injection-naïve persons first adopt IDU) are assisted by a person who injects drugs (PWID), and as such, IDU could be considered as a dynamic behavioral transmission process. Data suggest that opioid agonist treatment (OAT) enrollment is associated with a reduced likelihood of assisting with IDU initiation. We assessed the association between recent OAT enrollment and assisting IDU initiation across several North American settings and used dynamic modeling to project the potential population-level impact of OAT scale-up within the PWID population on IDU initiation.

Methods and findings

We employed data from a prospective multicohort study of PWID

SUBMITTER: Marks C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6879119 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature