“Genes tied to addiction in adults may help guide doctors to better treatments for infants born withdrawing from narcotics, according to researchers who identified the genetic link.
Babies exposed in the womb to opioid drugs who have certain variations to two genes had less severe withdrawal symptoms than those without the variants, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The babies left the hospital sooner and needed fewer treatments, researchers said. The study, the first to look at the link between genetics and opioid withdrawal in infants, may help researchers find more effective way to treat these babies, said Jonathan Davis, senior study author and chief of newborn medicine at Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.”
Source: BusinessWeek.com – April 30, 2013
“A vaccine to treat heroin addiction has proven effective in keeping drug-addicted rats from relapsing in a preclinical trial, according to a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the Scripps Research Institute in California say the vaccine is now ready for human trials.
Prescription drug abuse—something a whole industry of monitoring and law enforcement is growing up around—is a public health problem first, according to the state substance abuse officials responsible for treatment and prevention. That said, these same directors—the single state agencies (SSAs) with authority over the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment block grant—also want to participate in the prescription drug abuse conversation, explains Rob Morrison, executive director of the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD).
Sending drug abusers to community-based treatment programs rather than prison could help reduce crime and save the criminal justice system billions of dollars, according to a new study by researchers at RTI International and Temple University.
A scientist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research is developing a vaccine designed to treat heroin addiction while at the same time prevent HIV infection. This project is one of a number of research initiatives around the world that are working toward new vaccines to fight addiction.
It’s been known that among patients receiving methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) for opioid dependence, take-home privileges and methadone doses of at least 80 mg/day are associated with better treatment outcomes. But what hasn’t been known is whether patients with take-homes also have fewer acute care admissions, and consequently lower health care costs, or whether they have better health to begin with, thus fewer admissions.
Patients in methadone maintenance patients that exhibit treatment successes, including regular attendance at clinic and counseling sessions, as well as passing urine screenings for illicit drug use, are rewarded with “take home” methadone doses. Previous studies have shown that receiving “take home” doses and receiving doses of 80 milligrams or more are associated with improved addiction treatment outcomes, but the impact of these factors on hospitalizations was unknown.
U.S. crime statistics show illegal drugs play a central role in criminal acts, providing new evidence that tackling drugs as a public health issue could offer a powerful tool for lowering national crime rates, officials said on Thursday.
Researchers in China have developed a technique that rewrites the memories of drug addicts to lessen their association with pleasure and help prevent them from relapsing.
A recent study sought to learn if trazodone (marketed as Desyrel and Oleptro) could help recovering drug abusers sleep better. The study concluded that the trazodone did not help this population of patients.
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