Addiction Treatment Strategies – Part 20

When parents find out their teen is abusing drugs or alcohol, the family’s immediate focus is generally on getting help for the teen. But parents are often in great need of help themselves. They may need advice on what to say to their teen, how to evaluate whether he or she needs professional treatment and where to find the appropriate substance abuse treatment program if one is needed. A new toll-free telephone helpline is providing that assistance.
The Parents Toll-Free Helpline, 1-855-DRUGFREE (1-855-378-4373), is staffed by clinical social workers with practical experience in substance abuse prevention and treatment. The helpline,…

A team of Duke University Medical Center and Australian scientists has found that addictive drugs may have hijacked the same nerve cells and connections in the brain that serve a powerful, ancient instinct: the appetite for salt.
Their rodent research shows how certain genes are regulated in a part of the brain that controls the equilibrium of salt, water, energy, reproduction and other rhythms – the hypothalamus. The scientists found that the gene patterns activated by stimulating an instinctive behavior, salt appetite, were the same groups of genes regulated by cocaine or opiate (such as heroin) addiction.
“We were surprised…

A new system that ranks drugs on the basis of harm caused to both the user and others places. The scale, developed by drug experts led by Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London, is published online in The Lancet.
Drugs including alcohol and tobacco products are a major cause of harms to individuals and society. To provide better guidance to policy makers in health, policing, and social care, the harms that drugs cause need to be properly assessed. This task is not easy because of the wide range of ways in which drugs can cause harm, the researchers say.
When Professor Nutt and colleagues attempted this assessment previously in…

— Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an imaging protocol that allows them to visualize the activity of the brain’s reward circuitry in both normal individuals and those addicted to drugs. The technique could lead to better insight into why people take recreational drugs as well as help determine which treatment strategies might be most effective.
Drug addiction is a complex process that involves numerous biological and environmental factors, but a central element is how the drugs affect the activity of dopamine, the chemical that regulates pleasure and reward in the…

A growing number of babies born in Florida are addicted to prescription drugs. Doctors and nurses say they are seeing more babies addicted to prescription pills their mothers took during pregnancy. CNN reports that the state recorded 635 such births in the first half of 2010.
The babies “go through withdrawal symptoms,” Head Nurse Mary Osuch of Broward General Medical Center’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit told CNN. “They’re crampy, miserable. They sweat. They can have rapid breathing. Sometimes, they can even have seizures.”
For the past two years, prescription drug addiction has been more prevalent than crack addiction among the…

Excessive alcohol consumption appears to be associated with changes in some surgical skills performed on virtual reality simulator testing the following day

More than half of buprenorphine-related emergency department visits in the U.S. are for nonmedical use of the drug, according to data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN). Of the estimated
23,450 emergency department visits in 2009 in which buprenorphine was involved as either a direct cause or a contributing factor to the visit, 61% were for nonmedical use of the drug. Approximately one-fifth of the visits were related to seeking detoxification, 12% for adverse reactions, and 5% for accidental ingestion. The estimated number of emergency department visits related to the nonmedical use of buprenorphine has more than tripled since 2006…

1. Alcoholism affects the entire family.
 
Living with a non-recovering alcoholic in the family can contribute to stress for all members of the family. Each member may be affected differently. Not all alcoholic families experience or react to this stress in the same way. The level of dysfunction or resiliency of the non-alcoholic spouse is a key factor in the effects of problems impacting children.
 
Children raised in alcoholic families have different life experiences than children raised in non-alcoholic families. Children raised in other types of dysfunctional families may have similar developmental losses and stressors as do…

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 gambling to seemingly harmless products, such as chocolate – in other words, addiction may refer to a substance dependence (e.g. drug addiction) or behavioral addiction (e.g. gambling addiction).
 
This article focuses mainly on addiction to physical substances.
 
In the past addiction used to refer just to psychoactive substances that…

Neuroscientists at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) have developed a protein peptide that may be a novel type of highly targeted treatment for depression with a low side-effect profile. Depression affects one in ten Canadians at some time in their lives and is a leading cause of disability worldwide.
The study published in this month’s Nature Medicine found that coupling between two dopamine receptors was significantly elevated in the brains of people who had been diagnosed with major depression. “We identified a potential therapeutic target for development of novel anti-depressants.” said Dr. Fang Liu,…