The NIDA International Program and the Fogarty International Center, together with the Canadian Institute of Aboriginal Peoples’ Health and the Mexican Consejo Nacional Contra Las Addicciones (CONADIC), cosponsored the meeting Inhalant Abuse Among Children and Adolescents: Consultation on Building an International Research Agenda November 7-9, 2005, at the NIH Neuroscience Center in Rockville, Maryland. This highly successful meeting provided important updates on inhalant abuse and highlighted the need to increase awareness about the issue among researchers, health care providers, and the general public. The following priority research areas emerged from the discussion: (1) standardizing and adapting existing surveillance methods to better measure the extent of inhalant abuse; (2) designing, implementing, and evaluating treatment and prevention interventions tailored to inhalant abuse; (3) expanding basic science studies to better understand the mechanisms of action of inhalants on young brains; and (4) separating the effects of precursors of inhalant abuse from the consequences of that abuse. Meeting participants expressed particular interest in qualitative research, longitudinal studies to compile data about subjects before they begin using inhalants, and research that explores chronic vs. episodic and isolated vs. communal use patterns. The participants recommended that an international workgroup of pharmacologists and epidemiologists be created to classify substances and develop questions for use in screening instruments and surveys, and that international communications be improved through tools such as listservs, Web portals, or Web-casts.
