BUSSW Health Equity & Addiction Lab Presents at Boston Addiction Conference
A team of research assistants and students from the Health Equity & Addiction Lab (HEAL) at BUSSW presented a poster at Together for Hope: Boston Addiction Conference 2024. The poster summarizes the effectiveness of a stigma-based substance use intervention for Black patients with complex medical and behavioral health needs.
“Despite drinking alcohol at rates similar to the general population, Black adults are more likely to develop health and social consequences associated with alcohol use,” the authors explain. This trend illustrates the need for substance use disorder (SUD) interventions that work for Black patients. HEAL assessed the Culturally Adapted Stigma Mitigated Intervention (CASMI) and the preliminary data presented in their poster highlights its effectiveness, as well as areas for improvement.
CASMI, an intervention developed by Prof. Christina Lee, adapts a collaborative, goal-oriented style of communication called motivational interviewing to Latinx and Black primary care patients. Beginning with a NIH-funded trial in 2020, community health workers at the Boston Medical Center delivered CASMI to Black patients with medical complexities and SUD, a high-risk population that is often difficult for providers to reach.
The HEAL team reported high recruitment and retention rates among study participants at 3 months and 6 months after the initial surveys, suggesting that the patients were generally receptive to the overall intervention. However, the initial study struggled with low eligibility rates among patients. The authors hypothesize that this could be due to patients’ medical and behavioral complexities or that CASMI and health workers need to address unforeseen barriers Black adults face in reporting SUDs. “Greater efforts are needed to support Black adults with adverse social determinants of health into treatment studies,” says HEAL.
Poster creators include Prof. Christina Lee from BU School of Social Work (BUSSW), BUSSW research assistants Victoria A. Lopez and Caroline Melancon; Prof. Jake Morgan from BU School of Public Health; BU undergraduate students Nicole Robertson (CAS’24), Nathalie Ramirez Rodriguez (CAS’25), Alexandra Velev (CAS’24); Rodrigo Garcia (CAS’25), Christine Pace, MD from Boston Medical Center; Prof. Tamika Zapolski from Indiana University School of Medicine; and Prof. Rosemarie Martin from Brown University. Collaborators on the study include Anita Roscoe, Community Health Worker, and Dennis Gonzalez, Recovery Coach.
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HEAL: Health Equity & Addiction Lab, founded by Prof. Christina Lee, integrates interdisciplinary frameworks and methodologies to advance health equity through clinical research and practice. The HEAL Lab is committed to addressing health equity issues related to alcohol use and stigma, specifically among immigrant communities. They aim to translate their findings to the development and testing of culturally tailored and evidence-based clinical interventions to reduce health disparities. Learn more on their website.