Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New ResearchConstruct and Differential Item Functioning in the Assessment of Prescription Opioid Use Disorders Among American Adolescents
Section snippets
Study Sample
This study used data from the subsample of adolescents reporting the nonmedical use of prescription opioids (N = 1,290) in the public use file of the 2006 NSDUH.19 The NSDUH is the only ongoing survey that provides estimates of substance use and related disorders in the U.S. population. The survey's sampling frame covers approximately 98% of the total U.S. population aged 12 years or older and uses multistage area probability sampling methods to select a representative sample of the civilian
Nonmedical Opioid Users
Among the sample of adolescents aged 12 to 17 years, 7% (N = 1,290) reported nonmedical opioid use in the past year. Within this subsample, 15.1% met DSM-IV criteria either for opioid abuse (7.4%) or dependence (7.7%) in the past year. As shown in Table 1, 52% were female, and 67% were white.
Types of Opioids Used
Propoxyphene, hydrocodone, oxycodone, and codeine products were more commonly used than the other types of opioids: Vicodin, Lortab, Lorcet, or Lorcet Plus (for which lifetime use was reported by 52% of
Discussion
In this nationally representative sample of adolescent nonmedical opioid users, the criteria of OUDs were arrayed along a single continuum of severity. All abuse criteria were endorsed at a severity level higher than D1 (tolerance) and D5 (time spent) but lower than D3 (taking larger amounts) and D4 (inability to cut down). The abuse indicators clustered well with three dependence criteria (withdrawal, giving up activities, and continued use despite problems). These findings provide compelling
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Cited by (0)
This work was supported by research grants from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health to Dr. Wu (DA019623 and DA019901). The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research provided the public use data files for National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which was sponsored by the Office of Applied Studies of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and not of any sponsoring agency.
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The authors thank Amanda McMillan for editorial assistance.