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The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA, 2004) defines substance abuse epidemiology as the process of studying “the nature, extent, consequences
, and etiology of drug abuse across individuals, families, age groups, gender, communities, and population groups” and “providing an estimate of
the magnitude, impact, and risk of drug abuse on a population, and by laying the foundation for developing strategies to prevent drug abuse,
plan and evaluate drug abuse services, and suggest new areas for basic, clinical, and treatment research.”
This toolkit includes information on substance abuse disorders; descriptive and analytic epidemiology; general methodological issues; basic
study design; introductory statistics for epidemiology; qualitative methods; ethical issues; disseminating data and links to publicly available surveys and data. In addition, the user will find some special topics in substance abuse epidemiology, such as individual, developmental, and social or
environmental factors, genetics and epigenetics of substance abuse, and co morbidity of substance abuse with HIV and with psychiatric illness,
to name a few. This toolkit includes alcohol and tobacco in its definition of substance abuse epidemiology.
Each section contains a brief introductory guide, and where appropriate, points the user to areas on the web that contain descriptive content,
manuscripts, questionnaires, protocols, methodology, datasets, findings and reports, publications, and journals.
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