Pharmacological maintenance treatments of opiate addiction

New Clinical Implications of Opiate Maintenance Treatments

Opiate addiction is a chronic mental illness with severe repercussion in personal and public health. Various medicaments have been subjected to research in order to find a proper treatment, methadone is the most and wide used drug, buprenorphine/naloxone is the most recent ones, but other choices have been proposed such as prescribing heroin (1). The mentioned treatments, are considered as main...

new clinical implications of opiate maintenance treatments

Maintenance agonist treatments for opiate dependent pregnant women.

BACKGROUND The prevalence of opiate use among pregnant women ranges from 1% to 2% to as much as 21%. Heroin crosses the placenta and pregnant opiate dependent women experience a six fold increase in maternal obstetric complications such as low birth weight, toxaemia, 3rd trimester bleeding, malpresentation, puerperal morbidity, fetal distress and meconium aspiration. Neonatal complications incl...

Genetic Aspects of Opiate Addiction

By Arthur Falek, Ph.D. What is known about the genetic aspects of opiate addiction? Opiates such as heroin and dilaudid are drugs which have long been known to relieve or depress pain but increased consumption frequently result in uncontrolled drug use and addiction. These properties of opiates led to the discovery that there are specific opiate receptors in the brain and that the central nervo...

Neural systems underlying opiate addiction.

Opiate addiction is a chronically relapsing disorder that is characterized by compulsive drug taking, an inability to limit intake, and bouts of intense drug craving that can be precipitated by the mere presence of people, places, or objects previously associated with drug use. Although knowledge of the neural mechanisms that underlie the transition from casual drug use to addiction is still in...