Health sciences professor studies drug use in adolescents

Assistant professor Dr. Jason Goldstick and his collaborators will use a $100,000 grant to continue a long-term study of drug use among adolescents in Flint, Michigan.

One of Oakland University’s newest faculty members is bringing part of a $100,000 grant with him to the School of Health Sciences.

Assistant professor Dr. Jason Goldstick is taking research on substance abuse in teenagers to the next level.

Goldstick and two collaborators from the University of Michigan, his home school, have received the grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to help them carry out a secondary analysis of data that was collected during a long-term study of drug use in Flint, Michigan. Goldstick will lead the primary activities, in collaboration with the co-principal investigator (PI) at the University of Michigan, of the project as he continues his first year here.

The data used for this grant comes from the Flint Adolescent Study (FAS), which began in 1994 with a “cohort of scholastically underachieving ninth-graders in Flint,” according to Goldstick. It is ongoing and its primary aim is to study drug use and resiliency among this cohort.

“This grant is a statistical study of the drivers, and behavioral comorbidities – emphasizing sexual risk behaviors and violent behaviors – of substance use and how their effects vary by age,” Goldstick said.

The meat of the grant and work is highly technical from a statistical perspective, he said, and is broken into two primary pieces:

First, Goldstick and his co-investigators will use existing methods to study the FAS data and how risk factors for substance abuse vary by age, such as exposure to violence and family or peer influences.

Second, Goldstick will develop a new statistical procedure “which is essentially regression-type modeling where the outcome is the association between two variables, such as substance use and violence.”

He will develop the theory for this method, create software to fit it and make that software freely available as an R package.

The goals here, he said, are to a) further clarify the etiological process underlying substance use and its associated problems, and b) develop statistical methodology that can be used to further research in this area.

“The purpose of the project is to explore these ‘dynamic’ effects and to test for their presence using a rich data set with ages ranging from 14 to about 35,” Goldstick said. “The purpose of producing the software is for other researchers to use, because the kind of dynamics hypothesized here are likely to be relevant to other studies spanning key developmental periods.”