Predicting relapse in substance abusers as a function of drug of choice, personality factors, and cognitive variables

The phenomenon of relapse among formerly drug dependent individuals has been suggested by some substance abuse researchers to be one of the "core" features of addiction (O'Brien et al., 1991), thus demonstrating the necessity to try and understand this event and any mechanisms that may be contributing to the relapse process. For drug dependency disorders in general, there seems to be a variety of systems that may be involved with the clinical relapse. Among the more identifiable are those factors known as cognitive and non-cognitive variables. Over the years, several bodies of literature have existed which have reported the differential influence of both cognitive (e.g., intelligence) (Hambidge, 1990; Sussman et al., 1986), and non-cognitive factors (e.g., depression, and personality disorders) (Hesselbrock et al., 1986; Elal-Lawrence et al., 1986) on the recovery course of the drug dependent patient. To date, however, there is a scant amount of empirical data that addresses the additive effects of both cognitive and non-cognitive factors as they contribute to the likelihood of the relapse event.

The present study investigated the relationship between cognitive and non-cognitive variables and their combined role in predicting relapse in the drug dependent patient. Results from this study revealed distinctive patterns of relapse within different drug of choice categories among substance abusers. In addition, the data (e.g.. Beck Depression Inventory, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Shipley Conceptual Quotient and Verbal Raw scores and the presence of a secondary AXIS-II diagnosis) that was collected for this investigation proved benefical when predicting relapse within this sample.