Lastly, unlike other psychiatric disorders, substance use disorders can also be conceptualized more broadly as a type of exposure. Although substance use disorders are defined behaviorally as a user’s repetitive self-administration of substances despite negative consequences and/or resultant physiological dependence, biomarkers indicating disease or risks to health may be present in both the user and others inadvertently exposed through the same actions. Given that non-voluntary exposures such as prenatal alcohol exposure or secondhand smoke exposure also carry significant health and developmental consequences [18], detection of these kinds of exposures is therefore an additional public health priority, and merits additional consideration of the similarities and differences of biomarkers for various substance exposures in different developmental or environmental contexts.
