Browsing Primary and Social Care by Date published
Now showing items 1-20 of 357
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The Severity of Dependence Scale (SDS) for Codeine: Preliminary Investigation of the Psychometric Properties of the SDS in an Online Sample of Codeine Users From the UK.Objective: Investigate the psychometric properties of the Severity of Dependence Scale (SDS) for codeine and its association with aberrant codeine related behaviors. Design: A voluntary and uncompensated cross-sectional online survey. Setting: Online population (≥18 years). Respondents: Two hundred and eighty-six respondents (66% women) who had used codeine containing medicines in the last 3 months and were living in the UK. Results: Of the respondents (mean age = 35.4 years, SD = 12.5), more than half were employed. Only 3.5% respondents reported no income. The majority of respondents (45.1%) primarily obtained prescription-only codeine from a consultation with a health professional, whilst 40.9% mainly purchased "over-the-counter" codeine containing medicines in a pharmacy without a medical prescription. Principal component analysis indicated a single factor solution accounting for 75% of the variance. Factor loadings ranged from 0.83 to 0.89. Cronbach's Alpha was high (α = 0.92). Several behaviors relating to codeine use were found to significantly predict probable codeine dependence. These included: daily codeine use in the last 3 months (OR = 66.89, 95% CI = 15.8-283.18); tolerance to codeine (OR = 32.14, 95% CI = 13.82-74.75); problems with role responsibility due to intoxication (OR = 9.89, 95% CI = 4.95-19.78); having sought advice on the internet to manage codeine use (OR = 9.56, 95% CI = 4.5-20.31); history of alcohol or drug treatment (OR = 3.73, 95% CI = 1.88-7.43). Conclusions: The SDS was acceptable and feasible to use to assess probable psychological codeine dependence in an online sample of people using codeine containing medicines. SDS scores were associated with behaviors known to be indicators of codeine dependence. Studies are needed in well-defined populations of people who use codeine to test the different aspects of psychometry of the scale compared against "gold standard" criterion [a diagnosis according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)].
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Fpemlocal: Estimating family planning indicators in R for a single population of interest.The global Family Planning Estimation model (FPEM) combines a Bayesian hierarchical model with country-specific time trends to yield estimates of contraceptive prevalence and unmet need for family planning for countries worldwide. In this paper, we introduce the R package fpemlocal that carries out the estimation of family planning indicators for a single population, for example, for a single country or smaller area. In this implementation of FPEM, all non-population-specific parameters are fixed at outcomes obtained in a prior global FPEM run. The development of this model was motivated by the demand for computational efficiency, without loss of model accuracy, when estimates and projections from FPEM were needed only for a single country. We present use cases to produce estimates for a single population of women by union status or all women based on package-provided data bases and user-specified data. We also explain how to aggregate estimates across multiple populations. The R package forms the basis of the Track20 Family Planning Estimation Tool to monitor trends in family planning indicators for the FP2020 initiative. Fpemlocal is available from: https://github.com/AlkemaLab/fpemlocal.