The psychometric properties of the Drug Use Disorders Identification Test (DUDIT), an 11-item self-report questionnaire developed to screen individuals for drug problems, are evaluated. The measure, developed in Sweden and evaluated there with individuals with severe drug problems, has not been evaluated with less severe substance abusers or with clinical populations in the United States. Parti...

Analyzing hair for many substances can be tedious and expensive, and a rapid screening method should prove helpful. Generally, screening has been performed using immunological tests, mainly in workplace drug testing, where the number of samples has been high. The aim of this study was to develop an LC-MS-MS method for the simultaneous analysis of several drugs of abuse in human hair as an alter...

The use of protein crystallography in structure-guided drug discovery allows identification of potential inhibitor-binding sites and optimisation of interactions of hits and lead compounds with a target protein. An early example of this approach was the use of the structure of HIV protease in designing AIDS antivirals. More recently, use of structure-guided design with fragment-based drug disco...

Background Substance abuse remains one of the largest public health issues facing our society. Early alcohol and drug use is linked to a range of immediate and long-term consequences (e.g., academic, brain development, and later dependence). Although studies such as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and National Survey on Drug Use and Health have recently shown stable or slight decline in the use ...

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) protease inhibitors (PIs) are important components of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) that block the catalytic site of HIV protease, thus preventing maturation of the HIV virion. However, with two decades of PI prescriptions in clinical practice, drug-resistant HIV mutants have now been found for all of the PI drugs. Therefore, the continuous dev...

Regular performance of medication reviews is prominent among methods that have been advocated to reduce the extent and seriousness of drug-related problems, such as adverse drug reactions, drug-disease interactions, drug-drug interactions, drug ineffectiveness and cost ineffectiveness. Several screening tools have been developed to guide practising healthcare professionals and researchers in re...

The process of preclinical drug discovery consists of two steps: finding of initial hits (binding ligands to a medicinal relevant target, usually a protein) and lead optimization. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is a powerful tool that can provide valuable information to every step of drug development. NMR is commonly used for characterizing the structure and molecular dynamics of targe...

intravenous drug use (idu) is a frequent route of infection transmission, especially during the recent decades. numerous studies have addressed the increasing frequency of idu-associated infections such as hepatitis and aids. the present study was achieved to determine the prevalence of idu-associated infections in 3 teaching hospitals in iran. materials and methods for this descriptive study, ...