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Results 6 to 10 out of 15.

• 26/10/2011 - UK longer drinking hours ‘drive up workplace absence’
  Extended drinking hours in England and Wales have led to more than 660,000 extra days of absence from work every year, research has claimed. Economists at Lancaster University Management School used the government’s UK Labour Force Survey to compare work absence rates from before and after the 2005 licensing act changes. They found that absence rates rose by 1 per cent after more pubs and bars could legally stay open past 11pm. For a workforce of 25 million people a 1 per cent rise in sick leave equals an estimated 5,349,617 hours or 667,702 sick days in total across all workers in England and Wales. Researchers Colin Green and Maria Navarro also noted that the trend for increased absence is especially pronounced among women, possibly because female drinking has increased markedly in the UK within the last decades. Green and Navarro also examined absence data from neighbouring areas of the UK, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where longer opening hours were not brought in. Here they found “no significant changes in levels of absence”. They also looked at regions where the most extended licences were granted, which revealed a higher related rate of absence than other regions. The introduction of the policy in England and Wales is also believed to have increased the probability that people who drink regularly will suffer health problems (based on the British Household Panel Survey). The researchers concluded that an increase of 1.5 per cent in health problems among the working age population equates to an extra 501,000 people reporting ill health following the policy change. Again, the increase in reporting health problems is greater among women. In addition, the researchers examined similarly recent legislation in Spain where drinking hours were reduced from 6am closing to 2.30am to 3.30am. By studying the Spanish equivalent of the Labour Force Survey, researchers found symmetrical results for Spain and the UK. With decreased bar opening hours, Spanish workforce absence dropped, while in the UK sickness rose with the increase in drinking hours. Green told PM: “If you believe that you can extrapolate the Spanish findings to England and Wales, then the absence rates could come back down if the drinking hours were reduced.”
• 11/10/2011 - Készül az új Nemzeti Drogstratégia
  Lezárult az új nemzeti drogstratégia társadalmi és szakmai vitája. A Tervezet végleges szövege várhatóan október elejére készült el.
• 03/10/2011 - Welsh consultancy provides answers to dealing with employees on drink and drugs
  A WELSH workplace health consultancy has led the development of new Europe-wide guidelines to help managers deal with employees under the influence of drink or drugs. The Leonardo Foundation, part of the EC’s Lifelong Learning Programme, commissioned a project called Mepmis – Maximising Employee Potential by Minimising the Impact of Substances – to provide managers with the knowledge and confidence to take appropriate action.
• 10/08/2011 - Sleep disturbance and the effects of extended-release zolpidem during cannabis withdrawal.
  Sleep difficulty is a common symptom of cannabis withdrawal, but little research has objectively measured sleep or explored the effects of hypnotic medication on sleep during cannabis withdrawal. Twenty daily cannabis users completed a within-subject crossover study. Participants alternated between periods of ad libitum cannabis use and short-term cannabis abstinence (3 days). Placebo was administered at bedtime during one abstinence period (withdrawal test) and extended-release zolpidem, a non-benzodiazepine GABA(A) receptor agonist, was administered during the other. Polysomnographic (PSG) sleep architecture measures, subjective ratings, and cognitive performance effects were assessed each day. During the placebo-abstinence period, participants had decreased sleep efficiency, total sleep time, percent time spent in Stage 1 and Stage 2 sleep, REM latency and subjective sleep quality, as well as increased sleep latency and time spent in REM sleep compared with when they were using cannabis. Zolpidem attenuated the effects of abstinence on sleep architecture and normalized sleep efficiency scores, but had no effect on sleep latency. Zolpidem was not associated with any significant side effects or next-day cognitive performance impairments. These data extend prior research that indicates abrupt abstinence from cannabis can lead to clinically significant sleep disruption in daily users. The findings also indicate that sleep disruption associated with cannabis withdrawal can be attenuated by zolpidem, suggesting that hypnotic medications might be useful adjunct pharmacotherapies in the treatment of cannabis use disorders.
• 07/08/2011 - The relationship between anxiety disorders and alcohol use disorders: a review of major perspectives and findings
  It is generally agreed that problems related to alcohol use and anxiety tend to occur within the same individual (“comorbidity”); however, the cause of this association remains controversial. Three prominent perspectives are that anxiety disorder promotes pathological alcohol use, that pathological alcohol use promotes anxiety disorder and that a third factor promotes both conditions. We review laboratory, clinical, family, and prospective studies bearing on the validity of these explanatory models. Findings converge on the conclusion that anxiety disorder and alcohol disorder can both serve to initiate the other, especially in cases of alcohol dependence versus alcohol abuse alone. Further, evidence from clinical studies suggests that anxiety disorder can contribute to the maintenance of and relapse to pathological alcohol use. Relying heavily on pharmacological and behavioral laboratory findings, we tentatively propose that short-term anxiety reduction from alcohol use, in concert with longer-term anxiety induction from chronic drinking and withdrawal, can initiate a vicious feed-forward cycle of increasing anxiety symptoms and alcohol use that results in comorbidity.