Cochrane

Background: Incentives, usually as cash or as vouchers, are widely used to encourage smokers to try to quit, and to reward them if they succeed. Such schemes can be run in workplaces, in clinics, and sometimes as community programmes. For this third update of our review we now include studies in pregnant women. Another change is that we have separated ...

Background In this Cochrane review we aimed to measure the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions for treating people who harmfully use, abuse or are dependent on benzodiazepines (BZDs). BZDs are a type of drug that can be used to treat people who have anxiety, panic disorder, insomnia and a range of other conditions. Long term use of BZDs is ...

Background Cocaine is an illicit drug available as a powder for intranasal or intravenous use or smoked as crack. Short- and long-term use of this drug results in the spread of infectious diseases (for example, AIDS, hepatitis, tuberculosis), crime, violence and prenatal drug exposure. Cocaine dependence is associated with medical and psychosocial ...

Review question This review attempted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of baclofen as a therapy for alcohol withdrawal syndrome (AWS). Background In recent years, baclofen has demonstrated potential to reduce symptoms of severe AWS in people with alcoholism. Treatment with baclofen is easy to manage, without producing any obvious side effects. ...

Review question We reviewed the evidence about the effect of psychosocial interventions, such as contingency management (CM) and motivational interviewing based (MIB) techniques vs. usual care for pregnant women in outpatient illicit drug treatment programmes. Background Women who use illicit drugs while pregnant are more likely to give birth early ...

Background: Motivational interviewing is widely used to help people to stop smoking. It is a counselling style which helps people to explore and resolve their uncertainties about changing their behaviour. It tries to avoid an aggressive or confrontational approach and instead steer people towards choosing to change their behaviour, and encouraging their ...

Review question: This review asks whether family interventions can influence children and adolescents not to smoke, compared to no-intervention controls or as an add-on to a school intervention. We particularly focused on children who had never smoked. Background: Preventing children from starting to smoke is important to avoid a lifetime of addiction, ...

Medications that help people to stop smoking such as nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) are safe and effective treatments for smoking cessation. However, people often do not take the medication they are prescribed as they should. In the current review, we examined whether there are effective approaches to increasing adherence to these treatments, which ...

Who may be interested in this review? People with anxiety disorders and alcohol use problems, as well as their healthcare providers. Why is this review important? People with anxiety disorders often also abuse alcohol or have alcohol dependence. All anxiety disorders involve long-lasting and excessive fear, and can be classified according to the ...

In many countries a large investment is being made in technology to computerize patient medical records. One potential of electronic health records (EHR) is that they could be used to remind doctors and other clinic staff to record tobacco use, to give brief advice to quit, to prescribe medications and to refer to stop smoking counselling. They could ...