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My Sandbox

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PSYC 181 project practice
The results of a longitudinal study on substance use led the researchers to observe that abusing or relying on one drug increased the probability of also abusing or relying another drug. When discussing polysubstance dependence, any combination of three drugs can be used, but studies have shown that alcohol is commonly used with another substance. This is supported by one study on polysubstance use that separated participants who used multiple substances into groups based on their preference for a substance. The three substances were cocaine, alcohol, and heroin, which implies that those three were the most common for that sample. Other studies have found that opiates, cannabis, amphetamines, hallucinogens, inhalants and benzodiazepines are often used in combination as well.

Polysubstance dependence happens more often than was previously thought, according to a study that analyzed the results from the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, which found that approximately 215.5 out of a total of 43, 093 individuals in the United States (0.5%) met the requirements for polysubstance abuse/dependence. In Munich, Germany, a group of researchers chose to look at responses to a survey using the M-Composite International Diagnostic Interview (M-CIDI). Data was collected from 3,021 participants, all between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, regarding the prevalence of drug abuse/dependence and of polysubstance abuse/dependence. The results of this study indicated of the 17.3% who regularly used drugs, 40% said that they used more than one substance, but 3.9% specifically reported using three or more substances, indicating that there is a lot of overlap in the use of different substances.

Practice for Studies about Polysubstance Dependence and Personality/Mood (Psychological) disorders
According to a study done on patients from nine clinics in Norway, female polysubstance abusers had a higher frequency of post-tramautic stress disorders, borderline personality disorder, major depression and simple phobias.

Cognition studies and Polysubstance Dependence
Cognition refers to what happens in the mind, such as "perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and making decisions." One study decided to test the cognitive abilities of participants in rave parties who used multiple substances. To do this, they compared 25 rave party attenders with 27 control participants who were drug-free and in good health. The results of this study indicated that in general, the rave attenders did not perform as well on tasks that tested speed of information processing, working memory, knowledge of similarities between words, ability to attend while something is interfering with attention, ability to estimate the length of time of an event, and decision making. Certain drugs were associated with particular impaired functions, but the researchers suggested that the impairments for working memory and reasoning are a result of the misuse of multiple substances.

Another study that tried to find differences between the effects of particular drugs on cognitive abilities focused on polysubstance users who were seeking treatment for addictions to cannabis, cocaine, and heroin. They studied a group of polysubstance users and a control group that was not dependent on any drugs. Because alcohol was one of the co-substances for nearly all of the polysubstance user group, it was difficult to tell exactly which drugs were affecting certain cognitive functions. The researchers found that the difference in the two groups' performance levels on executive function tasks were significantly different, meaning that the polysubstance group consistently scored lower than the control group. In general, this meant that the multiple substances affected the polysubstance group's cognitive functioning, but the researchers found that the amount of cannabis and cocaine affected the verbal part of working memory, the reasoning task, and decision making, while cocaine and heroin have a similar negative effect on visual and spatial tasks, but cannabis specifically affected visual and spatial working memory. These results suggest that the combined use of cannabis, cocaine and heroin impair more cognitive functions more severely than if used separately.

One study decided to determine if polysubstance users who also abused alcohol would display poorer performance on a verbal learning and memory test in comparison to those who abused alcohol specifically. The California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) was used due to its ability to quantify small changes in verbal learning and memory by evaluating errors made during the test and the strategies used to make those errors. The results of this study showed that the group of polysubstance abusers and alcohol abusers performed poorly on the CVLT recall and recognition tests in comparison to the group of alcohol abusers only, which implies that alcohol and drug abuse combined impaired the learning and memory of the group of polysubstance and alcohol abusers group.

Causes
Biological

Some studies have focused on finding genes that predispose the person to be dependent on marijuana, cocaine, or heroin by studying genes that control a person's dopamine and opiate receptors, but no conclusive findings were reported. Other researchers found a connection between dopamine receptor genes and dependency on a substance, but admitted that because alcohol is commonly used with another substance, and there was the possibility of placing separate diagnoses of dependence on marijuana, cocaine, or opiates under a single substance dependence diagnosis, the results of the study may not have been caused to dependency on a single substance. This means that multiple substances may been contributing to the results, but the researchers suggested that further research should be done.

However, there are studies that have found evidence of the influence of genes on vulnerability to substance dependence. These studies often use genotype, or the genetic information found on a person's chromosomes, and phenotype, which consists of the visible features of a person, to look at genetic patterns. One study examined the phenotype and genotype of 1,858 participants from 893 families to look at differences in three nicotinic acetylcholine receptor genes found within these individuals. The experimenters found significant connections between receptor genes for nicotine and polysubstance dependence, which indicated that differences in these genes can create the risk of being dependent on multiple substances.