Five years ago, the Tufts Nutrition Collaborative - Center for Drug Abuse and AIDS Research (TNC-CDAAR) was funded by NIDA as just one of two CDAAR's in the nation. The CDAARs were charged with the following mission: to foster a collaborative approach to drug abuse and addiction research;to enable studies that would not occur without the climate, facilities, and resources that a research center can uniquely provide;to serve as a resource to attract established and promising investigators into drug abuse research; and to provide opportunities for research training, career development, and mentoring. The TNC-CDAAR was formed as a partnership between three East Coast Institutions (Tufts, Brown and Johns Hopkins) with a specific focus on studying nutritional and metabolic disorders among HIV-positive and HIV-negative drug users. Over the past five years, we have expanded the TNC-CDAAR to include collaborators from 3 international sites: Argentina, India, and Vietnam. Our major accomplishments, thus far, have been to 1) design and implement several new studies to assess and compare the prevalence and incidence of specific nutritional and metabolic disorders in drug users of different ethnicities, both in the U.S. and abroad;2) develop training materials, protocols, and manuals for investigators who want to undertake similar studies in their localities;3) help in the development of new grant proposals in Center-related areas of research;and 4) become a resource center on nutrition and metabolic disorders in drug users. The Center will continue to work to raise awareness of the importance of nutritional and metabolic disorders on outcomes in the drug using population and to encourage investigators to include studies of nutritional and metabolic status in their research in drug using populations. The five Center Cores will continue to work synergistically to provide a multitude of services for Center Members. Specifically, the purpose of this Core is to expand and maintain an infrastructure to standardize, document and formalize our existing expertise regarding issues related to drug user research. We will serve as a resource for all nutrition, endocrine and metabolic (TNC-CDAAR) Centerrelated studies and can assist with special issues related to working with drug using populations. Specialized expertise has been developed in the areas of community-based adherence interventions (including modified directly observed therapy), interventional and prevention research within the correctional setting and research integrating substance abuse treatment with medical care, particularly buprenorphine in a primary care setting.
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