An innovative program that will deliver alcohol treatment as part of routine TB care has been designed by American and Russian researchers.
The integration of alcohol screening, treatment and referral into primary care and other medical settings is not routinely done. Nor are there any studies evaluating the effectiveness of integrating care for alcohol use disorders (AUDs) into routine treatment for tuberculosis (TB), despite the high co-occurrence and mortality associated with these two diseases. Accordingly, researchers have designed a trial study to determine the effectiveness of integrating pharmacotherapy and behavioral treatments for AUDs into routine care for TB.
The study will be published in the February 2010 issue of
Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
"In many primary-care settings, screening for drinking problems is not necessarily a routine part of visits," said Shelly F. Greenfield, director of clinical and health services research and education in the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment Program at McLean Hospital and corresponding author for the study. "In many specialized medical settings, screening for alcohol problems is even less frequent," she added. "For example, in clinics that treat TB, it would not be common practice to screen for alcohol problems, yet alcohol problems often co-occur among patients with TB."
Greenfield said she and her colleagues chose to conduct their study in Tomsk, Russia because of its high rates of both alcohol problems and tuberculosis. "In Tomsk, we found that alcohol disorders in this population are common, with 50 percent of all TB patients meeting criteria for alcohol abuse or dependence sometime during their lifetime."