Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Unknown status
Study Type: Interventional
Official Title: Evaluating the Efficacy of Including Contingency Management to Standard Ambulatory Treatment for Crack Addiction - A Randomized Controlled Trial
Brief Summary:
Crack addiction has became a severe health problem in Brazil. Today, crack addiction is the primary cause for inpatient treatment (voluntary or not) for all illicit substances (losing only for alcohol addiction). A survey study conducted with children and adolescents currently living in the streets of 5 major cities of Brazil, point alarming results in which 15% to 26% of all these children have smoked crack at least once in the last month.
When compared to cocaine, crack users develop much faster diagnoses for crack dependence (mean of 5 month after first use), shows a more compulsive pattern of use, has higher probability of living or have lived in the streets, and of engaging in illegal activities. Consequently to this, mortality of crack addicts are 7 times higher than for the rest of the population.
Despite all efforts being made for the development of effective pharmacological treatments for stimulant addiction (crack included), up to today, there is no robust evidence of efficacy of any pharmacological treatment. For that reason, the use of evidence based psychosocial interventions is so important for treating this population.
Although today open treatment facilities in Brazil are more and more starting to use evidence based interventions such as motivational interviewing, cognitive behavior therapy, relapse prevention and coping skills, such treatments present very modest results when treating crack addiction. The biggest difficulties encountered when treating this population are maintaining patients in treatment, reducing crack use and achieving continued abstinence.
A psychosocial treatment based in behavioral principals' named Contingency Management (CM) is widely applied in the USA. Recent meta-analyses and revie