Opioid dependence, despite being the subject of significant public funding, remains a costly burden to Australian society in human and economic terms. The most cost-effective public health strategy for managing opioid dependence is opioid substitution therapy (OST), primarily through the use of methadone or buprenorphine. Supervised dispensing of OST from specialist clinics and community pharma...

BACKGROUND Harm reduction strategies commonly include needle and syringe programmes (NSP), opioid substitution therapy (OST) and interventions combining these two strategies. Despite the proven effectiveness of harm-reduction strategies in reducing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection among injecting drug users (IDUs), no study has compared the cost-effectiveness of these interventions,...

IMPORTANCE Buprenorphine opioid agonist treatment (OAT) has established efficacy for treating opioid dependency among persons seeking addiction treatment. However, effectiveness for out-of-treatment, hospitalized patients is not known. OBJECTIVE To determine whether buprenorphine administration during medical hospitalization and linkage to office-based buprenorphine OAT after discharge increa...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to provide a preliminary assessment of the safety, tolerability, symptom control, and acceptability of buprenorphine-naloxone buccal film (BBN) for the maintenance treatment of opioid dependence in patients converted from buprenorphine-naloxone sublingual tablet or film (SLBN), as well as to determine the conversion ratio for switching patients from SLBN to...

BACKGROUND Opioids are psychoactive analgesic drugs prescribed for pain relief and palliative care. Due to their addictive potential, effort and vigilance in controlling prescriptions is needed to avoid misuse and dependence. Despite the effort, the prevalence of opioid use disorder continues to rise. Opioid substitution therapies are commonly used to treat opioid dependence; however, there is ...

BACKGROUND/AIM Relapse of opiate dependence is a common occurrence after detoxification and introduction of opiate addicts in abstinence from opiates. Clinical evaluation showed that over 90% of opiate addicts exhibit depressive manifestations during detoxification, or develop post-detoxification depression. The aim of this study was to determine differences in the frequency of relapses, severi...

addiction to the illicit and prescribed use of opiate is an alarming public health issue. studies on addictive disorders have demonstrated severe nutritional deficiencies in opiate abusers with behavioral, physiological and cognitive symptoms. opiate addiction is also link with a significant number of diseases including human immunodeficiency virus (hiv), hepatitis c virus (hcv) and other blood...

Abstract Background: Methadone maintenance therapy is a treatment of choice for opiate addiction. Understanding opiate dependents’ experiences of patients' treatment is a key to continue the treatment and can provide help to revise the standards of methadone centers and improve the quality of treatment. This study aimed to describe the essence and structure of opiate dependents’ e...

INTRODUCTION Recent studies (Gold et al, 1978; Washton et al, 1980a) showing that the non-opiate antihypertensive agent, clonidine hydrochloride, suppresses signs and symptoms of opiate withdrawal, have suggested that clonidine and similar drugs might be useful in the clinical management of opiate detoxification. The fact that clonidine is not an opiate drug and does not itself produce addictio...