Sat. Oct 12, 2019 2:50 PM - 4:30 PM Room 6 (401+402)

Organizer / Chair: ‌Toshikazu SAITO (Miki Mental Clinic / Department of Psychiatry, Sapporo Medical Univesity, Japan), Discussants: ‌Sungwon ROH (Department of Psychiatry, Hanyang University College of Medicine, Korea), Tony Szu-Hsien LEE (Department of Health Promotion and Health Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan)

Alcohol and drug abuse is a serious public health problem among Asian countries that affects almost every community. The magnitude of problems and situations of alcohol and drug use as well as addictive disorders differ country by country, due to such region-specific aspects as the components of the community and cultural differences. Dealing with such problems in various countries is aimed to clarify the region-specific aspects of problems in addiction in countries’ context, thereby contributing to delineate the issue and further to develop a better understanding of the problems and management. Addressing and solving these problems requires information from research that is specific to the context of the society.
As mentioned above, we plan to make a symposium titled “Early career researchers symposium: Clinical research in progress on addictive medicine”. This symposium aims to highlight research projects in the addictive field that investigated by young international researchers. It will focus on different types of clinical research projects that young researchers are conducting them including observational studies, clinical trials, and data analyses. Each participant will share their research projects in development, describe their aims, methods, preliminary data, and future goals of the research projects. The presentations include some evidence supporting the biopsychosocial model of addiction, which focus on both in neurobiological and psychosocial findings on understanding the situations of the problems, the progression, and the outcome of addictive behaviors, including some parts of management among the different countries.
Furthermore, this symposium will show that initiating research projects is a challenging task for a young researcher, particularly the limited time and funding. It will also demonstrate some of the key elements of developing a successful research project including finding adequate mentorship, building a research team, and working through the obstacles during conducting the research projects. We hope that the symposium attendances will understand the problems of drug addiction in this region. This will lead to the more in-depth discussion of this issue and further collaboration for further researches in the future.