RSS Feed
December 31st, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda FRIDAY, Dec. 30 (HealthDay News) — Drug users who inject themselves
with methamphetamine are 80 percent more likely to attempt suicide than
those abusing other drugs, new research reveals.
The magnified risk for meth users is probably rooted in a mixture of
social, structural and neurobiological factors, say researchers from
Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City and
the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
“Compared to other injection drug users, it is possible that
methamphetamine users are more isolated and have poorer social support
systems,” study author and Mailman postdoctoral fellow Brandon Marshall
said in a Columbia news release.
Marshall and his colleagues report their findings in the December issue
of Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
The team used material from interviews involving nearly 1,900 men and
women that were conducted in the Vancouver area over seven years, from
2001 to 2008. The authors note that Vancouver‘s downtown eastside district
is well known as a center for illegal drug use.
“This is one of North America’s largest cohorts of injection drug
users, and the research is among the first longitudinal studies to examine
attempts of suicide by injection drug users,” Marshall (who is also a
research coordinator for the Urban Health Research Initiative in British
Colombia) said in the release.
A little more than a third of the participants were women, and another
third were of Aboriginal descent. All responded to questions regarding
their drug use, treatment experience and risky behaviors with respect to
HIV. All told, 8 percent were found to have previously attempted
suicide.
The authors found that meth injection was linked to a greater risk for
suicide attempts across the board. That is, even infrequent meth users
bore an elevated risk for attempting suicide, while those who frequently
injected meth faced the highest such risk.
“The high rate of attempted suicide observed in this study suggests
that suicide prevention efforts should be an integral part of substance
abuse treatment programs,” Marshall said. “In addition, people who inject
methamphetamine but are not in treatment would likely benefit from
improved suicide risk assessment and other mental health support services
within health care settings.”
The study was funded by both the U.S. National Institutes of Health and
the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
More information
For more on methamphetamine, visit the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Related posts:
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
