Preparing for the 6th international meeting on ADHD and Substance Abuse

I’m counting the days until the 6th international meeting of ICASA (International Collaboration on ADHD and Substance Abuse) in Stockholm, Sweden, march 26th and 27th.

The Stockholm meeting will be the most challenging meeting of ICASA so far. There will be 30 participants from 13 countries. We will talk about the first experiences in our first joined study, the EASP (European ADHD in Substance use disorders Prevalence). We will talk about the added DNA sampling in this study. We will hear the results of the pre-pilot study on ADHD, Substance Abuse and co-morbid disorders in youngsters engaging in crime. We will work on the details of our Genetics of Drug & Alcohol Dependence and ADHD (DADA) research proposal.
Beside all this, we will decide on the future of ICASA. Both the structure of ICASA (foundation or not?) and the financial situation need to be discussed. A busy, interesting program for just two days!

The ICASA meeting will be preceded by a Swedish Conference on ADHD and Substance Abuse on Wednesday 25th of March. And I will personally visit some clinics in Sweden to hear about the first experiences with the EASP-research.
Are you as curious as I am about the latest developments and study results? Please visit this blog in the next weeks: From March 23rd till March 30th, I will daily fill you in on all the details!

Genetic study: GO!

Genetics of Substance Use Disorders and ADHD

Yes! We’ve got the go-ahead and will develop this study.
Yesterday evening we had this extra meeting on developing a research project on the genetics of SUD and ADHD. Before discussing this in the entire group of ICASA-researchers we discussed the plan with a smaller group. It proves to be a challenge to design a proper study. We need large samples of patients, with well defined diagnoses.
The costs involved for analyzing DNA samples are impressive. Via ICASA we have access to large numbers of patients with SUD. And we have world class experts and institutes on board: Columbia University (New York), Karolinska institute (Stockholm), Curtin University (Perth) and University Vall d’Hebron (Barcelona) to mention a few.
Today (Friday) we will discuss the genetics study in the plenary ICASA meeting.

Geurt

Headlines#3: science versus anecdotes

Here are the last headlines of today:

Miquel Casas, Barcelona. “There are no miracles in science!” He pointed on the self-medication hypothesis: some patients may in fact use cannabis or cocaine to control their (undiagnosed) ADHD. That prompted the idea that ADHD-treatment would easily solve the hard drug abuse… That turned out not to be so simple. “Complex behaviour, comorbidity, social factors and neuro-adaptive processes are not altered after one session,”, Casas said.

Van den Brink: “ADHD and SUD: double diagnosis – double trouble, both for patients and for society.” He pointed out, that these diseases may have common factors, however: “if you share things, that does not mean you are identical. We have to build science and clinical evidence on the two interacting disorders ADHD and SUD. We have to distinguish anecdotes from science. Every patient is different. Our patient-population is extreme heterogeneous. Hence we encourage polypharmacy and polytherapy, to cover both diseases,” Van den Brink concluded.