The Key to Individualized Addiction Treatment is Comprehensive Assessment and Monitoring of Symptoms and Behavioral Change

Abstract

Modern health services now strive for individualized treatment. This approach has been enabled by the increase in knowledge derived from neuroscience and genomics. Substance use disorders are no exception to individualized treatment even though there are no gene-specific medications yet available. What is available is the ability to quickly and precisely assess and monitor biopsychosocial variables known to vary during addiction recovery and which place addicts at increased risk of relapse. Monitoring a broad spectrum of biopsychosocial health enables providers to address diverse genome-specific changes that might trigger withdrawal from treatment or recovery relapse in time to prevent that from occurring. This paper describes modern measurement tools contained in the NIH Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) and the NIH Toolbox and suggests how they might be applied to support recovery from alcohol and other substance use disorders in both pharmacological and abstinence-oriented modalities of care.

Keywords

• addiction
• recovery
• monitoring
• NIH PROMIS
• NIH Toolbox
• individualized medicine