Study: men oscillate between cocaine use and abstinence more often than women.

The rates of transition between cocaine use and abstinence differed significantly between men and women, with men oscillating between states nearly twice as fast as women, according to findings published in the Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology.

Researcher Robert J. Gallop of West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania, and colleagues reached this conclusion after testing for differences between men and women in transition rates between abstinence and non-abstinence from cocaine use based on data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse Collaborative Cocaine Treatment Study (CCTS). Specifically, Gallop and his team applied a mixed effect Markov model (MMM) to abstinence/nonabstinence data from the CCTS, incorporating random effects to model the subject-to-subject variability in the transition rates. The researchers also applied generalized linear mixed models and linear mixed models to examine average use between men and women.

Participants …