Factors affecting substance use relapse in women: a systematic review

A serious health issue is substance abuse and relapse rates in the world. Relapse rate among substance users being under remission is very high. The aim of this study is to investigate the factors affecting the recurrence of substance use in women.

This systematic review study through various search strategies sought electronic databases for relevant studies. The electronic databases included Comprehensive Humanities Portal, the specialized bank of medical articles, the Iranian Research Institute of Science and Information Technology, Noormags, Magiran, Irandoc, Scientific Information Database (SID), PubMed, Science Direct, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science and Google scholar. These articles were published in 2016 up to 2022.

During the process of probing, 3455 articles were identified. After exploring the titles, abstracts and the full texts of the articles, 34 articles were found to meet the inclusion criteria. The findings of 34 articles indicated that the most frequent factors among various researches are unemployment, interpersonal problems such as divorce, death of spouse or family disputes, cravings during abstinence, easy and cheap access to drugs, negative emotions such as depression and anxiety, lack of sufficient social support, pleasure-seeking, maladaptive coping strategies, and physical pain. These factors classified into four categories (individual, interpersonal and social, structural, occupational and economic).

It is effective and practical to design interventions to reduce the substance use relapse in women under remission based on the findings of this study.