OBJECTIVE Drug misuse in pregnancy is associated with impaired infant visual development. Pilot data showed abnormal flash visual evoked potentials (VEPs) in neonates exposed to methadone in utero, but results were confounded by intrauterine growth restriction, gestation, and ongoing drug misuse. This large cohort study aimed to clarify the effects on neonatal flash VEPs of maternal drug misuse...

US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) approved gabapentin as an adjuvant treatment for refractory partial seizures several diverse disorders. The drug has a relatively safe profile is well tolerated; however, awareness required to monitor the patient's medication, its misuse, how approach better patient fate. Despite enormous scientific hypothesis encircling drug, there requisite research fur...

One quarter of the prescription drugs sold in the United States are used by the elderly, often for problems such as chronic pain, insomnia, and anxiety. The prevalence of abuse may be as high as 11 percent with female gender, social isolation, depression, and history of substance abuse increasing risk. Screening instruments for prescription drug abuse have not been validated in the geriatric po...

Use of both licit and illicit drugs can lead to a range of medical, psychiatric and social problems, and the situation becomes further complicated if the user is pregnant. Prescribed and non-prescribed substances can affect a pregnancy, and substances are seldom used in isolation. In this review we focus on users of illicit drugs (including prescribed drugs used illicitly) during pregnancy and ...

Urbanization is probably the single most important demographic shift world-wide throughout the past and the new century and represents a sentinel change from how most of the world's population has lived for the past several thousand years. As urban living becomes the predominant social context for the majority of the world's population, the very ubiquity of urban living promises to shape health...

A wide range of population-based and clinical studies in the literature consistently demonstrate that substance use/dependence is one of the most common mental health-related disorders (Cohen et al, 1999; Coulthard et al, 2002; Crawford et al, 2003). A national study of psychiatric comorbidity in the UK found that the prevalence of dependence on any drug was 4% and dependence on cannabis was re...

objective: erroneous beliefs about causation and lack of adequate knowledge have been found to sustain deep seated negative attitudes about mental illness. conversely, better knowledge results in improved attitudes towards people with mental illness and a belief that mental illnesses are treatable can encourage early treatment seeking and promote better outcomes. the aim of this study was to as...