Drug addiction can be a devastating and chronic relapsing disorder with social, psychological, and physical consequences, and more effective treatment options are needed. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a noninvasive brain stimulation technique that has been assessed in a growing number of studies for its therapeutic potential in treating addiction. This review paper offe...

We use polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for schizophrenia (SCZ) and bipolar disorder (BPD) to predict smoking, and addiction to nicotine, alcohol or drugs in individuals not diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Using PRSs for 144 609 subjects, including 10 036 individuals admitted for in-patient addiction treatment and 35 754 smokers, we find that diagnoses of various substance use disorders and smo...

Introduction: The most common substance of abuse/dependence in patients presenting for treatment in western countries is alcohol. Ethyl alcohol or ethanol which is also called medicinal alcohol is used as an official drug compendium. It is also administered as an antidote in methanol poisoning. However, regular consumption of high amounts of alcoholic drinks induces dependence and addiction lea...

ALTHOUGH 13 MILLION TO 16 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE UNITED States each year could benefit from treatment for addiction disorders, less than 25% of them receive it. Negative attitudes of physicians toward diagnosis and treatment of addiction create barriers to their early identification and treatment. In one survey of general practice physicians and nurses, a majority believed that no available medi...

AIMS To examine whether individual changes in alcohol consumption among female alcoholics under treatment are predicted by level of and changes in depression and dysfunctional attitudes. METHOD A total of 120 women who were treated for alcohol addiction at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm (Sweden) were assessed twice over a 2-year period using the Depression scale from the Symptom Checkli...

Background: Tincture of opium (TOP) is currently used for maintenance therapy in treatment of opioids addiction. It contains ethanol. The present study was conducted to assess the increase in blood alcohol concentration (BAC) in its users; a process which may interfere with breath-alcohol test performed by law enforcement or traffic police. Methods: A total of 143 individuals were selected rand...

BACKGROUND Chronic medical diseases require regular and longitudinal care and self-management for effective treatment. When chronic diseases include substance use disorders, care and treatment of both the medical and addiction disorders may affect access to care and the ability to focus on both conditions. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the association between the presence of chroni...

Alcohol addiction is a chronically relapsing disorder that includes certain maladaptive learning and memory. The serine and threonine kinase complex, mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1), has been implicated in synaptic plasticity, learning, and memory by controlling protein translation. Here we show that administration of alcohol and excessive voluntary consumption of alcohol induc...

Background. Alcohol and nicotine are commonly coabused. The search for a common core of neural, behavioral, and genetic factors underlying addiction has been the goal of addiction research. Purpose. Genetic predisposition to high alcohol intake has been studied in rats by selectively breeding rats that have high preference for alcohol. The current experiments were conducted to determine if the ...

Cocaine addiction is increasingly considered to stem from the development of maladaptive, stimulus bound, drug seeking habits that both contribute to the maintenance of drug use despite aversive consequences, and also to high rates of relapse. However because relapse by definition occurs only after a period of abstinence, the relative contribution of habits and pharmacological withdrawal from t...