The National Institute on Drug Abuse funded the RAND Opioid Policy Tools and Information Center (OPTIC) to develop reliable data, rigorous methods, and policy tools to inform evidence-based opioid policy. OPTIC will assess the opioid crisis as it continues to evolve, describe the policies being implemented to address it, identify the impact of alternative strategies taken by the state and federal government, and suggest policy approaches that have yet be tried together as comprehensive strategies for improving public health and public safety.
UCLA’s psychoneuroimmunology center: The Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) focuses on research aimed at the psychosocial and behavioral factors that influence health and disease through psychoneuroimmunological (PNI) pathways. Its work has or is examining “the reciprocal regulation of immune response gene expression and central nervous system (CNS) function”; sleep disturbance and depression risk; the role of social stress; and how behavioral changes could reduce inflammation and curb insomnia and depression; among other topics. Part of UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, it also helps funds related research projects. Contact: 310-825 8281.
Tackling Harmful Alcohol Use: Economics and Public Policy: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released this paper on global alcohol consumption and societal costs of alcohol use. It provides a detailed examination of trends and socioeconomic disparities in alcohol consumption.
Socioeconomic Disparities in Health Behaviors
Fred C. Pampel, Patrick M. Krueger, and Justin T. Denney, Annual Review of Sociology (2010)
An excellent review of evidence for and against nine major pathways by which socioeconomic status shapes health behavior. “These studies recognize that SES disparities in health behavior involve more than freely chosen lifestyles,” the authors asssert. “To the contrary, the explanations reviewed below suggest that unhealthy behaviors result from the vast differences in the social circumstances of low- and high-SES groups.”
Association of socioeconomic position with health behaviors and mortality. The Whitehall II study
Silvia Stringhini, Séverine Sabia, Martin Shipley, Eric Brunner, Hermann Nabi, Mika Kivimaki, and Archana Singh-Manoux; Journal of the American Medical Association (2010)
Follow-up on the Whitehall II study finds that health behaviors account for most of the observed difference in mortality between lower and higher social status populations.
Perceived stress as a risk factor for changes in health behaviour and cardiac risk profile: a longitudinal study
N. H. Rod, M. Grønbæk, P. Schnohr, E. Prescott, T. S. Kristensen; Journal of Internal Medicine (2009)
Individuals with high levels of stress compared to those with low levels of stress were less likely to quit smoking, more likely to become physically inactive, less likely to stop drinking above the sensible drinking limits, and stressed women were more likely to become overweight during follow-up. Men and women with high stress were more likely to use antihypertensive medication, and stressed men were more than two times as likely to develop diabetes during follow-up.