A Critical Review of Alcohol Administration Guidelines in Laboratory Medication Screening Research: Is It Time to Include Treatment Seekers?

This article considers the practice of recruiting nontreatment-seeking heavy drinkers to participate in laboratory screening studies. By convention, volunteers are excluded from laboratory screening studies that involve alcohol administration if they are deemed "treatment seeking," meaning that they recently stopped drinking or are motivated to do so. Although this common practice may reduce risk to participants, findings may not accurately predict medication effects on treatment seekers. Indeed, there is empirical evidence that treatment seekers differ from non-treatment seekers in their responses to medications (Ray et al., 2017; Mason et al., 2006). Here, we argue for the importance of recruiting treatment seekers for this research due to their qualitative difference from nontreatment seekers. We argue that these individuals should be the default population in human laboratory medication screening studies. We conclude by discussing 2 case examples of medication experiments led by our research groups that involved administering medications to treatment seekers. PMID: 33190310 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Alcoholism, Clinical and Experimental Research - Category: Addiction Authors: Tags: Alcohol Clin Exp Res Source Type: research