The scope of this study is to estimate the prevalence of alcohol abuse and alcohol addiction and the respective associated factors in the urban population of a city of northeastern Brazil. It is a population-based cross-sectional study that investigated the consumption of alcohol of 270 people living in the urban area of Jequié, State of Bahia. Alcohol abuse, defined by a score of > 8 from resp...

Alcoholism is a chronic remitting and relapsing condition; its aetiology and pathophysiology remains largely obscure despite recent advances. This review summarises the current knowledge about the causation (biological or psychological) of alcohol addiction. This involves heredity, candidate genes, alcohol metabolism regulation and the influence of alcohol in the pathophysiology of the differen...

Although altered function in neural reward circuitry is widely proposed in models of addiction, more recent conceptual views have emphasized the role of disrupted response in prefrontal regions. Changes in regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are postulated to contribute to the compulsivity, impulsivity, and altered executive fun...

BACKGROUND The number of internet users is increasing rapidly and internet addiction among adolescents has become a serious public health problem in Korea. In the light of behavioral addiction, this study was aimed to identify the associations between the risk of internet addiction and other problem behaviors which can lead to addiction, such as cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, drug abuse, ...

This study explored the pattern of video game usage and video game addiction among male college students and examined how video game addiction was related to expectations of college engagement, college grade point average (GPA), and on-campus drug and alcohol violations. Participants were 477 male, first year students at a liberal arts college. In the week before the start of classes, participa...

INTRODUCTION We examined the prevalence of substance use disorders among homeless and vulnerably housed persons in three Canadian cities and its association with unmet health care needs and access to addiction treatment using baseline data from the Health and Housing in Transition Study. METHODS In 2009, 1191 homeless and vulnerably housed persons were recruited in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ott...

There are currently effective, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved therapies for alcohol, nicotine, and opioid addiction. In some cases these therapeutics were rationally designed and tested using a combination of various animal models of addiction. In many cases, however, effective drug therapies for addiction were derived from the testing of compounds developed for other CNS diso...

Alcohol and drug abuse take a large toll on society and affected individuals. However, very few effective treatments are currently available to treat alcohol and drug addiction. Basic and clinical research has begun to provide some insights into the underlying neurobiological systems involved in the addiction process. Several neurotransmitter pathways have been implicated and distinct reward ne...

Background: High prevalence of risky behaviors in alcohol dependents have been shown in several studies, but correlation between alcohol abuse and risky behaviors and relapse in patients with opiate dependence has been less investigated. This study aimed to determine the effect of alcohol abuse in rate of risk-taking behaviors in opiate dependents patients treated on maintenance program in Nort...

Addiction to cocaine is commonly preceded by experiences with legal or decriminalized drugs, such as alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana. The biological mechanisms by which these gateway drugs contribute to cocaine addiction are only beginning to be understood. We report that in the rat, prior alcohol consumption results in enhanced addiction-like behavior to cocaine, including continued cocaine u...