Consumption of psychoactive substances by victims of violent death in Grande Recife-PE

• Grant number: 23/07045-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: April 01, 2024
• End date: March 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine - Legal Medicine and Deontology
• Principal Investigator: Vilma Leyton
• Grantee: Patrícia Alessandra Yuri Ueda
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina (FM). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Numerous studies have documented significant associations between the consumption of ethanol and/or drugs with the occurrence and perpetration of violent acts, including homicides, suicides, traffic accidents and other violent deaths. Brazil has the second highest homicide rate in South America, which has been increasing since the end of the 1970s. The Northeast region, in particular, has the highest homicide rate in the country, and the second highest in suicides between the years from 2010 and 2019. Although the correlation between drugs and violence is a topic that is widely discussed in the international literature, national data on the subject are still scarce. To fill this gap, the candidate proposes to estimate the prevalence of alcohol use in combination or not with other illicit drugs among victims of violent deaths autopsied at the Legal Medical Institute of Recife (IML-Recife) in the years 2022 and 2023. part of a larger study being developed at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo (FMUSP), whose main objective is to estimate the prevalence of alcohol use in combination or not with other illicit drugs among victims of violent deaths necropsied at the Institutes Legal Doctors from five cities representing the five major regions of the national territory: Belém, Curitiba, Vitória, Brasília and Recife. Our master's project seeks to understand the problem of the use of psychoactive substances in the city of Recife, located in the Brazilian Northeast region. For this, blood samples and socio-demographic data are being collected from victims and incidents that resulted in death at the IML-Recife. Blood samples are collected by local professionals, stored under appropriate conditions and sent to the Toxicology Laboratory of the Forensic Sciences Center at FMUSP, where toxicological analyzes of the substances of interest are carried out. Ethanol is confirmed by gas chromatography with a headspace separation technique and flame ionization detection (GC-FID) and drugs by high performance liquid chromatography coupled with in tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS), a technique considered gold standard for drug identification. In the end, the data obtained by this project will help to understand the correlation of both factors (alcohol/drugs and violence) and their prevalence in the region (Recife-PE), which may serve as a basis for the subsidy of possible policies public health authorities on the subject and the enactment of preventive strategies aimed at reducing mortality and the use of psychoactive substances by the population.