The Vancouver Intravenous Drug Users Study (VIDUS) is a long-running study of HIV-negative people who inject drugs, aiming to understand the natural history of injection drug use and inform the development of health policies and interfections.
Description
V-DUS incorporates two long standing cohorts:
- The Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study (VIDUS) = HIV negative adults who use injection drugs
- At-Risk Youth Study (ARYS) = Street involved youth ages 14-26 who use drugs
These cohorts were combined in 2014 and permit longitudinal analyses of the natural history of drug use.
Objectives
- To examine the impact of prescription opioid misuse on injecting initiation and cessation, risk behaviors for HIV and other viruses, and non-fatal and fatal overdose in a setting with an active heroin market
- To characterize early injecting careers, with a focus on the individual and social-structural factors that shape initiation, risk behaviors for HIV and other viruses, early cessation, and sustained injecting
- To characterize established injecting careers, with a focus on the individual and social-structural and environmental factors that shape cessation of and relapse into injecting, morbidity and mortality
- To continue to collect data that facilitate comparisons between HIV-positive and HIV-negative PWID in analyses that examine health service use, morbidity, and mortality.
Current Research
Fentanyl, Non-medical PO use, and Overdose
- High levels of exposure to fentanyl (Hayashi et al., DAD 2018)
- Non-medical PO use associated with injection initiation (DeBeck et al., IJDP 2016)
- Initiation into PO use not associated with reduced heroin use (Lake et al., DAD 2016)
- PO and heroin injection associated with significant increase in overdose risk (Lake et al., DAD 2015); HIV status not associated with overdose risk (Escudero at al., Addict Behav 2016)
Substance use treatment
- Documented that MMT is protective against HCV infection (Nolan et al., Addiction 2014) and associated with better engagement in HCV care among HCV-positive PWID (Ti et al., PLOS ONE 2018)
- Demonstrated that difficulty accessing addiction treatment independently predicts subsequent initiation into injection among young substance users (DeBeck et al., SATPP 2016)
Natural History of drug use
- Characterizing injection initiation (Hadland et al., JAH 2012; Feng et al., JAH 2013)
- Characterizing injection cessation (Ti et al., DAD 2014; Hadland et al., JAH 2017)
- Documented declining mortality among HIV positive substance users during Seek, Test, Treat, Retain initiatives (Hayashi et al., JID 2017)