Monitoring of benzodiazepine diversion using a multi-indicator approach
International Clinical Psychopharmacology, 08/30/2011
Clinical Article
Pauly V et al. – This study shows that these methods yield consistent results. Their integration into a single multi–indicator approach gives health authorities a global view of different behaviors regarding diversion of a given drug.
Methods- 14 benzodiazepine (BZD) or BZD–like medications were analyzed with 3 data sources aiming to assess prescription drug abuse for year 2008
- After descriptive analysis, principal component analysis was carried out to explore correlations between 7 indicators obtained by different methods using these 7 different data sources and to compute a composite score of diversion for these drugs
- For all the indicators, flunitrazepam appears first with much higher values than the other drugs, whereas clonazepam appears in second or third place
