Indirect Assessment and Intervention for Perinatal Drug Use

Two factors limit the potential of brief interventions for the reduction of substance abuse and HIV risk. First, the ability to conduct such interventions is dependent upon willingness to disclose drug use and risky sexual behaviors. This is a significant obstacle given evidence that as few as half of drug-positive individuals-particularly women in the perinatal period-report that use. Second, there are logistic and financial obstacles to implementing even brief intervention programs, particularly with regard to time, training and provider willingness. In response to these limitations, and with NIDA support (DA018975), the Parent Health Lab at the Wayne State University School of Medicine developed and validated a sensitive indirect screener that evaluates correlates of illicit drug use rather than drug use itself. The Lab also developed a brief computer-delivered intervention designed to build change motivation without presuming the presence of risks to accompany the screener. This intervention demonstrated excellent feasibility and acceptability in Phase I testing. Following NIDA's Stage Model of Behavioral Therapy Development, the proposed study will take the next step of validating the computer-delivered indirect screening and intervention process in a Phase II/Stage IIb trial with women determined to be at risk by the indirect drug use screener. In addition, given that 47.8% of the prior sample's participants had an STI at some point in their lives, the proposed study will also further expand the existing focus on HIV risk. Specifically, we plan to: (a) continue development and validation of the WIDUS screener via concomitant collection of WIDUS protocols and hair/urine samples, as well as by building its ability to indirectly predict HIV risk; (b) revise and upgrade the draft indirect intervention based on expert and participant informant feedback; (c) recruit 500 at-risk women from an urban obstetric hospital; and (d) randomly assign participants into intervention and control conditions, with blinded follow-up assessments at 3- and 6-months. If proven efficacious, this logistically feasible, replicable, and low-cost approach could allow a dramatic increase in the reach--and therefore the population impact--of brief interventions for drug use among at-risk post-partum women. Further, any impact on maternal drug use would be further multiplied by indirect effects on the at-risk child.