{"doi":"10.1111/add.15286","title":"Commentary on Jin <i>et al</i>. (2020): Expanding the impact of opioid agonist therapy for opioid use disorder—are there lessons from the HIV/AIDS response?","abstract":"Jin and colleagues reviewed opioid agonist therapy (OAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD) globally [1]. Failure to access or adhere to OAT is a major concern [2, 3]. Accessing opioid agonist therapy (OAT) and maintaining good adherence faces many barriers which can be geographical, financial, regulatory, situational or logistic. In some settings, lack of services hinders access to treatment for people living with opioid use disorder (OUD). In other settings—even where health-care and medications are provided free of charge—many people who have OUD do not seek OAT. In the United States, recent ‘estimates suggest a gap between treatment need and capacity of 1.4 and 1.3 million in 2012, respectively’ [4]. The ongoing epidemic of OUD needs to develop strategies to recruit and keep patients on OAT. Approaches described in the HIV/AIDS literature may be useful to improve rates of access and treatment retention. For instance, a 2017 meta-analysis showed that HIV testing uptake escalated after social media interventions and even more in the studies where social media interventions were ‘participatory’ [5]. Future research on OAT uptake could therefore assess the merit of using them to enhance OUD diagnosis in primary and specialty care settings (e.g. pain clinics). We also often fail to identify OUD because of stigma. This is another important area where HIV/AIDS research documented a strong association with medication adherence [6]. Health-care provider education could therefore employ strategies to reduce stigmatizing beliefs that may influence adherence. The HIV literature documents the effectiveness of various types of interventions—professional interventions such as creation of multi-disciplinary teams, educational interventions such as peer-led self-management and electronic interventions, for example, text message reminders—in promoting adherence to therapy [7]. Although the current evidence on adherence-promoting interventions for OUD is not strong enough to encourage routine clinical use of behavioral approaches, the limited evidence available suggests that such strategies may be useful for determining the circumstances in which people with treatment-refractory OUD can reduce opioid use. Given that premature dropout interrupts most treatment episodes, which hinders compliance to dosing guidelines and achievement of effective therapeutic doses, we need new information technology practices, together with behavioral interventions proven effective in HIV/AIDS, to strengthen adherence and to support re-engagement in care after interruption. None. The authors thank staff and colleagues at the BC Centre on Substance Use for the operational support and Michee-Ana Hamilton for administrative assistance with the manuscript preparation and revision. Jan Klimas: Conceptualization; formal analysis; investigation; project administration; resources; writing-original draft; writing-review & editing. Evan Wood: Conceptualization; investigation. Rita McCracken: Conceptualization; investigation; writing-review & editing. This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health (R25DA037756); the Canada Research Chair program; and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (165004). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 701698.","journal":"Addiction","year":2020,"id":127448,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9572,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":333706,"name":"Evan Wood","orcid":"0000-0001-9412-6699","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":576234,"name":"Rita McCracken","orcid":"0000-0002-2962-0364","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":576233,"name":"Ján Klimas","orcid":"0000-0002-5179-0052","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":7,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:15:30.930746Z","pmid":"33037840","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}