The lifetime prevalence of substance use (SU) remains high and consistent in the United States, reflecting interventions targeting risk and protective factors have yielded limited success. Recreational use of illicit substances often leads to substance use disorder (SUD), indicated by persistent SU despite negative consequences. A more direct approach would be to expand a risk perspective focusing on factors related to elevated probability and severity of disorders to a resistance perspective. The Resist! Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, focuses on identifying resistance factors that can decrease the probability of SU or SUD and leading to health. The goal of this project is to measure individual resistance to SU in childhood and use the resistance indices to identify factors influencing SU/addiction liability into early middle adulthood, with a special focus on potentially modifiable factors. Achieving this goal is enabled by measuring childhood liability to addiction using previously collected data from two longitudinal twin studies: the Virginia Twin Study of Adolescent and Behavioral Development, VTSABD (1,214 twin pairs), a 6-wave cohort study of twins from age 8 to 32, and the Minnesota Twin and Family Study, MTFS (1,382 twin pairs, 6-waves from age 11 to 29). Project results will identify resistance factors that enable individuals to remain unaffected to SU and addiction or recovery from them.
Our work focuses on three areas:
(1) An Umbrella Review of the Risk and Resistance Factors Associated with SU
(2) Group Concept Mapping Study and Wave 7 Data Collection
(3) Resistance Indices Development