The brain activity induced by heroin-related cues may play a role in the maintenance of heroin dependence. Whether the reinforcement or processing biases construct an everlasting feature of heroin addiction remains to be resolved. We used an event-related fMRI paradigm to measure brain activation in response to heroin cue-related pictures versus neutral pictures as the control condition in hero...

One hundred and ten male heroin addicts were administered 'Eysenck Personality Questionnaire' a self reporting measure. High scores on psychoticism, neuroticism and lie scale and low scores on extroversion in heroin addicts as compared to normal controls (n=50) were observed in this study which were comparable with those reported earlier. Further, it appears that high neuroticism scores are mor...

This paper examines the effects of cocaine and heroin prices and possession arrests on medical examiner mentions of cocaine and heroin in 37 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) over the 1990-1998 period. Using data from DAWN, STRIDE, Uniform Crime Reports, BEA, BLS, and the Census Bureau, OLS regression results show that without the inclusion of MSA dummies, there is a highly significant nega...

DisCussion Two recent reports by the US Department of Health and Human Services indicate recent trends in heroin use. The 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that heroin incidence rates rose during the 1990s. There were 146,000 new heroin users in 2000 (1). Data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) report estimated that heroin was involved in 162,137 emergency department vi...

The Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), one of the most common co-morbid psychiatric disorders in heroin-dependent patients, is associated with a lack of affective modulation. The present study aimed to compare the affect-modulated startle responses of opioid-maintained heroin-dependent patients with and without ASPD relative to those of healthy controls. Sixty participants (20 heroin-depen...

Heroin addiction is a chronic, complex disease, often accompanied by other concomitant disorders, which may encumber effective prevention and treatment. To explore the differences in expression profiles of serum proteins in control and heroin addicts, we used two-dimensional electrophoresis coupled to MALDI-TOF/TOF, and identified 4 proteins of interest. Following validation of the increase in ...

After injection, heroin is rapidly metabolized to 6-monoacetylmorphine (6-MAM) and further to morphine. As morphine has been shown to increase striatal dopamine, whereas 6-MAM has not been studied in this respect, we gave i.v. injections of 3 μmol 6-MAM, morphine or heroin to rats. Opioids were measured in blood, and dopamine and opioids in microdialysate from brain striatal extracellular fluid...

Recent evidence suggests that heroin users in the UK are 16 times more likely to die than otherwise expected, although causes of death are varied. The present investigation examines deaths of heroin users at a large Scottish general practice over a four-year period prior to 1 July 1985. A mortality rate of 9.72 per 1000 heroin-user patients per year was observed, roughly half that previously re...

Although opioids have been extensively studied for their impact on the immune system, limited information is available about the specific actions of opioids on intracellular antiviral innate immunity against HIV infection. Thus, we investigated whether heroin, one of the most abused drugs, inhibits the expression of intracellular HIV restriction microRNA (miRNA) and facilitates HIV replication ...