Notice Announcing Data Harmonization for Substance Abuse and Addiction via the PhenX Toolkit

Notice Number: NOT-DA-12-008

Release Date: February 24, 2012

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

The purpose of this Notice is to announce a major data-harmonization effort at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and to describe its implications for investigators in the addiction-science community.

The NIDA is dedicated to advancing science by improving the yield and impact of its research portfolio. One way to accomplish this is to provide investigators with a common set of tools and resources that allow their work to span the manifold areas of the addiction sciences. Toward this end, the NIDA, in conjunction with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Cancer Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research, and the broader scientific community, has identified a series of Core and Specialty measures that will promote the collection of comparable data across studies.

The NIDA strongly encourages human-subject studies to incorporate the measures from the Core and Specialty collections, which are available in the Substance Abuse and Addiction Collection of the PhenX Toolkit (www.phenxtoolkit.org).

Core: Tier 1: The measures in this collection are deemed relevant and essential to all areas of addiction science. NIDA grantees/applicants conducting human-subject studies are strongly encouraged to incorporate, at a minimum, the Core-Tier 1 measures.

Core: Tier 2: The measures in this collection are deemed relevant to all areas of addiction science. Because Tier-2 measures are considered more burdensome and specialized than the Tier-1 measures, NIDA grantees/applicants conducting human-subject studies are strongly encouraged to incorporate them whenever possible and appropriate.

Specialty: The measures in this collection are deemed relevant and essential within specific areas of addiction science. NIDA grantees/applicants conducting human-subject studies in the specified areas of science are strongly encouraged to incorporate the Specialty measures.

Through the use of these measures, NIDA-funded researchers will be able to share, compare, and integrate data across studies. By advocating the use of these common measures, the NIDA and its partners in science aim to further enhance knowledge about substance abuse and addiction, while advancing a culture of scientific collaboration.

Please direct all inquiries to:

Kevin P. Conway, Ph.D.
Deputy Director, Division of Epidemiology, Services and Prevention Research
National Institute on Drug Abuse
6001 Executive Boulevard, Suite 5185
Bethesda, MD 20892-9589
(p) 301.443.6504
(f)  301.443.2636
(e) kconway@nida.nih.gov
http://www.drugabuse.gov/