The purpose of this review is to provide evidence surrounding the effectiveness of psychological interventions that are adapted or tailored to women for the treatment of anxiety disorders (including posttraumatic stress disorder), depressive disorders, and substance-related and addictive disorders, and to identify relevant evidence-based guidelines.

While smoking prevalence in the U.S. and other industrialized countries has decreased substantially, this change has been unevenly distributed, with dramatic decreases in certain subpopulations but little change or even increases in others. Accordingly, considerable attention has been fruitfully devoted to identifying important risk factors for smoking (e.g., mental illness, other substance use disorders). However, there has been little research on the intersection of these risk factors. As risk factors rarely occur in isolation, it is important to examine risk-factor profiles as is commonly done in studying other chronic conditions (e.g., cardiovascular disease). The purpose of this Commentary is to encourage greater interest in the intersection of multiple risk factors using cigarette smoking as an exemplar. We focus on the intersection of eight well-established risk factors for smoking (age, gender, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, poverty, drug abuse/dependence, alcohol abuse/dependence, mental illness). Studying the intersection of risk factors is likely to require use of innovative data-analytic methods. We illustrate, using years 2011-2016 of the US National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health, how Classification and Regression Tree (CART) analysis can be an effective tool for identifying risk profiles for smoking. Examination of the intersection of these risk factors elucidates a series of risk profiles with associated, orderly gradations in vulnerability to current smoking, including the striking and reliable strength of a college education as a stand-alone profile predicting low risk for current smoking, and illustrating the potentially increasing importance of drug abuse/dependence as a risk factor.

Nicotine is regarded as the main active addictive ingredient in tobacco products driving continued tobacco abuse behavior (smoking) to the addiction behavior, whereas nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR) is the crucial effective apparatus or molecular effector of nicotine and acetylcholine and other similar ligands. Many nAChR subunits have been revealed to bind to either neurotransmitters or exogenous ligands, such as nicotine and acetylcholine, being involved in the nicotinic receptor signal transduction. Therefore, the nicotinic receptor signalling molecules and the receptor-ligand molecular interactions between nAChRs and their ligands are universally regarded as crucial mediators of cellular functions and drug targets in medical treatment and clinical diagnosis. Given numerous endeavours have been made in defining the roles of nAChRs in response to nicotine and other addictive drugs, this review focuses on studies and reports in recent years on the receptor-ligand interactions between nAChR receptors and ligands, including lipid-nAChR and protein-nAChR molecular interactions, relevant signal transduction pathways and their molecular mechanisms in the nicotinic receptor signalling systems. All the references were carefully retrieved from the PubMed database by searching key words "nicotine", "acetylcholine", "nicotinic acetylcholine receptor(s)", "nAChR*", "protein and nAChR", "lipid and nAChR", "smok*" and "tobacco". All the relevant referred papers and reports retrieved were fully reviewed for manual inspection. This effort intend to get a quick insight and understanding of the nicotinic receptor signalling and their molecular interactions mechanisms. Understanding the cellular receptor-ligand interactions and molecular mechanisms between nAChRs and ligands will lead to a better translational and therapeutic operations and outcomes for the prevention and treatment of nicotine addiction and other chronic drug addictions in the brain's reward circuitry.

The aim of this analysis is to identify latent subgroups of women based on substance use, exposure to violence, and risky sexual behaviors and quantify discrete stages of behavior change over time. Data comes from 317 women recruited from a Municipal Drug Court System in the Midwest. All participants were interviewed regarding their substance use and sexual behaviors, as well as their exposure to violence at baseline, a 4th-month follow-up, and an 8th-month follow-up. A latent transitional analysis (LTA), a longitudinal extension of a latent class analysis (LCA), was used to quantify discrete stages of behavior change. The results of our analyses revealed 4 distinct behavioral profiles in our sample: 1) women with high probabilities of risky sexual behaviors, exposure to violence, and crack/cocaine use, 2) women with a high probability of exposure to violence, and moderate sexual risk taking, 3) women characterized solely by a high probability of crack/cocaine use, 4) women with low probabilities of all factors. The proportion of women in latent statuses characterized by a high probability of crack/cocaine use did not substantially decrease over time. Women who experienced child sexual abuse, had a greater number of lifetime arrests, were older, and believed they had risky drug using behavior that needed changing at baseline were significantly more likely to be in higher-risk latent statuses. Targeted interventions tailored to crack/cocaine users, as well as a wide-spread need for trauma-informed interventions among females involved in the criminal justice system, are needed.

This case report centres on the post-mortem distribution of the synthetic cannabinoid MDMB-CHMICA and its metabolites in the case of a 27-year-old man found dead after falling from the 24th floor of a high-rise building. Toxicological analysis of post-mortem samples confirmed, besides consumption of the synthetic cannabinoids MDMB-CHMICA (1.7 ng/mL femoral blood) and EG-018, the abuse of THC (9.3 ng/mL femoral blood), amphetamine (1050 ng/mL femoral blood), MDMA (275 ng/mL femoral blood), and cocaine. Regarding EG-018 and cocaine, only traces were detected in heart blood as well as in the brain (EG-018) and urine (cocaine), respectively, which is why no quantification was conducted in the femoral blood sample. It was concluded from femoral blood analysis that, at the time of death, the man was under the influence of the synthetic cannabinoid MDMB-CHMICA, THC, amphetamine and MDMA. Comprehensive screenings of all post-mortem specimens were conducted to elucidate the post-mortem distribution of MDMB-CHMICA and its metabolites. The MDMB-CHMICA concentrations ranged between 0.01 ng/mL (urine) and 5.5 ng/g (brain). Comparably low concentrations were detected in cardiac and femoral blood (2.1 ng/mL and 1.7 ng/mL, respectively) as well as in the psoas major muscle (1.2 ng/g). Higher concentrations were found in the lung (2.6 ng/g), liver (2.6 ng/g), and kidney (3.8 ng/g). Gastric content yielded a MDMB-CHMICA concentration of 2.4 ng/g (1.1 μg absolute). Screening for MDMB-CHMICA metabolites resulted in the detection of mainly monohydroxylated metabolites in the blood, kidney, and liver specimens. Results indicated that monohydroxylated metabolites of MDMB-CHMICA are appropriate target analytes for detecting MDMB-CHMICA intake.