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CABHR Hosted College Drinking Forum
Alcohol consumption among college students is a serious public health concern, one that is particularly pressing in Wisconsin. Surveys at University of Wisconsin campuses reveal that more UW students drink alcohol compared with national averages, and those who drink consume more per occasion than national averages.

Motivated by such indicators, CABHR is leading an effort to create a consortium of Milwaukee-area universities, colleges, and community organizations to develop strategies to reduce problem drinking among young adults here.

Consortium members will work to implement evidence-based prevention strategies across multiple campuses in the Milwaukee area. The planning group will also carry out a systematic process and outcome evaluation. Over the next few months, the planning group will identify and recruit potential consortium partners and will discuss possible directions for prevention program design.

To further stimulate collaboration, CABHR hosted a workshop on college drinking on May 18, 2009 at UWM.
The morning program, open to the community, included a panel presentation by leading experts on college drinking prevention strategies, including William DeJong, Ph.D., of the Boston University School of Public Health, and Bob Saltz, Ph.D., of the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, California. In the afternoon, consortium members met with the experts to discuss implementing prevention strategies. The workshop was funded in part by a grant from MillerCoors.

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CABHR Launches Major Study of Risk Behavior in Women
CABHR scientist Laura Otto-Salaj, Ph.D., has received a five-year, $2.9 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study the causes of risk behaviors among African American women in Milwaukee housing developments.

A specialist in the intersection of substance use and HIV sexual risk behaviors in women, Dr. Otto-Salaj says she has often been frustrated by the lack of research on what triggers risky choices. “We have some ideas, but we don’t really know for sure,” she says. Part of the problem is that the women who engage in risk behaviors often have complicated histories, involving factors such as sexual abuse and mental illness, and most studies don’t address that complexity. “ I have a feeling that the methods and interventions that we’ve been using are just too simplistic,” she says. “The result is that a lot of risk reduction interventions just don’t work as well as we’d like.”

To address this lack of information, Dr. Otto-Salaj’s team will recruit 398 African American women between the ages of 18 and 45, randomly selected from units in Milwaukee housing developments.She and her team will interview participants nine times over twelve months, asking them questions on topics such as their sexual risk, alcohol and drug use, experiences of physical and sexual abuse, current levels of victimization, personal and family history of mental illness, and violence in their communities. The team will analyze their answers, hoping to spot what leads some women pursue risk behaviors while others are resilient and avoid those risks.

Dr. Otto-Salaj will hire five or six full-time staff members to run the project. One of her main tasks, she says, is to select a project coordinator “who knows Milwaukee housing developments inside and out.” The project team will also include CABHR scientists Michael Brondino, Ph.D., Susan Rose, Ph.D., and Michael Fendrich, Ph.D.

Study Targets Opioid Dependence
CABHR scientists Michael Fendrich, Ph.D., Lisa Berger, Ph.D., and Mike Brondino, Ph.D., recently received funding from UW–Madison through the University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.

With these funds, Drs. Fendrich, Berger and Brondino will test an intervention to provide a combination of Buprenorphine and Nalaxone to opioid-dependent participants in the Dane County drug court treatment program. They will compare office-based to clinic-based delivery of medication. The project is led by Randy Brown, M.D., of the UW–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.