Substance dependence | Addiction Treatment Strategies

Previous Month’s Illegal Drug Use By County Demographic in 2009

Giving Medicaid patients with substance abuse problems access to buprenorphine (Subutex, Suboxone) is ultimately less expensive than maintaining them on methadone, the experience in one state showed.
Despite more frequent relapses into addiction, buprenorphine patients cost about $1,330 less…

New Findings On How Rats Make Choices May Provide Insights Into Addiction And Impulse-driven Behavior
Researchers have shed new light on dopamine’s role in the brain’s reward system, which could provide insight into impulse control problems associated with…

Often, for people suffering with drug addiction meditation has never been a matter for contemplation.  As soon as they experience any feelings of restlessness, anxiety or depression, they usually turn to their drug of choice to alter their state. Although the truth is that for many people…

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have identified abnormal brain structures in the frontal lobe of cocaine users’ brains which are linked to their compulsive cocaine-using behaviour. Their findings were published today, 21 June, in the journal Brain.
Led by Dr Karen Ersche,…

From heroin and cocaine to sex and lies, Tetris and the ponies, the spectrum of human addictions is vast. But for Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the neuroscientist in charge of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, they all boil down to pretty much the same thing. She must say it a dozen times a day:…

Many people do not understand why or how other people become addicted to drugs. It can be wrongfully assumed that drug abusers lack moral principles or willpower and that they could stop using drugs simply by choosing to change their behavior. In reality, drug addiction is a complex disease,…

A new national study shows that from 1998 to 2008 (the most recent year with available figures) substance abuse treatment admissions among those 12 and older related to the abuse of benzodiazepine drugs rose from 22,400 in 1998 to approximately 60,200 in 2008. The report by the Substance…

A team of Scripps Research Institute scientists has found a key biological mechanism underpinning the transition to alcohol dependence. This finding opens the door to the development of drugs to manage excessive alcohol consumption.
“Our focus in this study, like much of our…

People with an addiction do not have control over what they are doing, taking or using. Their addiction may reach a point at which it is harmful. Addictions do not only include physical things we consume, such as drugs or alcohol, but may include virtually anything, such abstract things as…