painkillers | Addiction Treatment Strategies

Action is needed to tackle the increasing number of deaths in the United States and Canada from prescription painkillers known as opioids, say experts in an article published online in the British Medical Journal.
 
Opioids are prescription painkillers that contain compounds derived from the opium poppy.
 
While they have long been used to control the symptoms of cancer and acute medical conditions, they are increasingly being used to control chronic pain, for example in patients suffering from osteoarthritis, say Dr Irfan Dhalla and colleagues at the University of Toronto.
 
They describe how in the US, deaths involving…

No child aspires to a lifetime of addiction. But their brains might. In new research to appear online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology this week, Rockefeller University researchers reveal that adolescent brains exposed to the painkiller Oxycontin can sustain lifelong and permanent changes in their reward system – changes that increase the drug’s euphoric properties and make such adolescents more vulnerable to the drug’s effects later in adulthood.
The research, led by Mary Jeanne Kreek, head of the Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases, is the first to directly compare levels of the chemical dopamine in…

 A new study by researchers at Drexel University’s School of Public Health suggests that abuse of prescription painkillers may be an important gateway to the use of injected drugs such as heroin, among people with a history of using both types of drugs.
 The study, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, explores factors surrounding young injection drug users’ initiation into the misuse of opioid drugs. Common factors identified in this group included a family history of drug misuse and receiving prescriptions for opioid drugs in the past. The results support a need for efforts to prevent misuse of prescription…

In 2010, 5.1 million people ages 12 and older reported the nonmedical use of prescription pain relievers in the past month, according to data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). The majority of these users—60.1%—reported that they obtained the pain relievers free from a friend or relative. The other most commonly mentioned methods were obtaining them from a doctor (27.1% from one doctor and another 4.9% from more than one doctor) and buying them from a friend or relative (26.8%). Among those who used pain relievers nonmedically and indicated that they obtained the drugs from a friend or relative for free, 76.7%…

The number of overdose deaths from powerful painkillers more than tripled over a decade, the government reported Tuesday – a trend that a U.S. health official called an epidemic, but one that can be stopped.
 
Prescription painkillers such as OxyContin, Vicodin and methadone led to the deaths of almost 15,000 people in 2008, including actor Heath Ledger. That’s more than three times the 4,000 deaths from narcotics in 1999.
 
Such painkillers “are meant to help people who have severe pain,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which issued the report….

NOTE: THIS WEEK I ATTENDED A PRESENTATION ON AN OPIATE ANTI-CRAVING MED HERE IN THE MIDWEST. TOWARD THE END OF THE TALK WAS A BRIEF PRESENTATION OF SIDE EFFECTS. MOST OF THE STANDARD SIDE EFFECTS WERE THERE. TOWARD THE END OF THE LIST WAS THE FOLLOWING WORD… “TOOTH ACHE”. IT TOOK ME A COUPLE OF SECONDS…
ADMIN/MK
In the cover article of this month’s Journal of the American Dental Association, a group of nine dentists, pharmacists, and addiction experts provides new research and recommendations to help dentists combat, rather than contribute to, abuse of addictive painkillers.
The Obama administration turned a…

It’s easy to overdose or to patch over problems that require a doctor’s care.
Research adds the list of risk factors, but it also sees possible new benefits.
 
When something hurts, most Americans open their medicine cabinets and pop a few capsules, tablets or gel-caps.
Acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen: More than 80% of us report using these four main over-the-counter analgesics, according to the market research firm Mintel. Two-thirds of us keep stashes on hand, not just at home but also at work, in our handbags or in the car. And about half of us have multiple bottles available, just in case.
All that pill…