Investigating Progression in Substance Use Initiation Using a Discrete-Time Multiple Event Process Survival Mixture (MEPSUM) Approach.

ABSTRACT: The order and timing of substance initiation has significant implications for later problematic patterns of use. Despite the need to study initiation from a multivariate framework, survival analytic methods typically cannot accommodate more than two substances in one model. The Discrete-Time Multiple Event Process Survival Mixture (MEPSUM; Dean, Bauer, & Shanahan, 2014) model represents an advance by incorporating more than two outcomes and enabling establishment of latent classes within a multivariate hazard distribution. Employing a MEPSUM approach, we evaluated patterns of tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis initiation in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N=18,923). We found four classes that differed in their ages and ordering of peak initiation risk. Dem

SUBMITTER: Richmond-Rakerd LS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4844227 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature