Suddhasatta Acharyya, PhD, Center for Statistical Sciences, Brown University, 167 Angell Street, 2nd Floor, Providence, RI 02912, (401) 863-9873, acharyya@stat.brown.edu and Heping Zhang, PhD, Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University, 60 College Street, New Haven, CT 06520.

Men and women entering drug treatment programs are known to differ in demographic characteristics and psycho-social behavioral patterns. To be effective, any such program that caters to individuals from both sexes, should be able to identify and address these gender-based variations. Studies have also reported clinical differences in the effect of drugs on men and women addicts. Here, we try to examine if the treatment is equally effective on men and women, when several demographic covariates are controlled. We construct a “problem severity index (PSI)” to categorize individuals based on how acute their problem was at the start of the program. We also examine how the choice of treatment modality affects treatment success. Exploratory analysis is carried out through the use of odds ratios, followed by more formal testing, carried out in the framework of cumulative logit models.

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