Decision aids (DAs) are interventions designed to help people make specific and deliberative choices among options by providing information about the options and outcomes that is relevant to a person's health status.There is an ongoing discussion about the quality of DAs. The present article provides an overview on systematic approaches using various quality criteria. However, these evaluation ...

Currently, there are no vaccines to fight against cocaine addiction for use in humans. Clinical trials for a few competitor antibodies are in different stages and a protected and viable immunization is sought after before the end of 2016.

First, a couple of definitions and distinctions: "abuse" according to the American Psychiatric Association describes a pattern of use that causes impairment of social or occupational functioning. Compare that to "dependence," characterized by either tolerance (a need for increasing amounts of a drug, over time, to achieve the same effect) or withdrawal symptoms. "Addiction" is defined by compul...

What is drug addiction? It is drug taking on the part of the individual that is usually excessive, harmful to the individual or his/her social environment, and which therefore presents a significant public health problem. The chapters in this technical review deal with the variety of issues of why drug addiction affects only some of us. As documented in these chapters, many of us are exposed on...

Buprenorphine is being introduced as a new treatment drug for narcotics addiction in the United States. The authors were asked by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to conduct a field trial to determine if buprenorphine might play a role in street markets. Because no street use of the drug existed in the United States, the authors used three sources of information: (a) "street readings" of cl...

The main aim of the present study was to specify and test a structural model to examine the relationships between four psychopathy dimensions (Interpersonal Manipulation, Callous Affect, Erratic Lifestyle, and Antisocial Behavior), childhood exposure to violence, and rape myth acceptance while controlling for gender, age, sample type (prisoner vs. non-prisoner), and relationship status. Partici...

Drug dependence is still to be recognized in developing countries as a significant public health problem and literature on the magnitude of this problem is limited. The present research was planned to study the socio-demographic profile and the reasons for substance use among patients admitted at De-addiction centres in Mangalore, India. In this cross-sectional study, all the patients admitted ...

BACKGROUND Researcher-stakeholder collaboration has been identified as critical to bridging research and health system change. While collaboration models vary, meaningful stakeholder involvement over time ("integrated knowledge translation") is advocated to improve the relevance of research to knowledge users. This short report describes the integrated knowledge translation efforts of Connectio...

The abuse of psychotropic drugs and addiction to them is an undeniable health issue. Based on United Nation reports, 185 million individuals across the globe are afflicted with illicit drug abuse. Considering the 2 billion alcohol consumers and at least one billion cigarette smokers, the need to conduct further studies and designing more effective treatments is even more apparent and considered...

Approach and avoidance are critical components of novelty seeking, which plays an important role in susceptibility to drug abuse and aspects of cognition. This experiment was designed to examine whether brief periods of handling or prior exposure to a novel environment affect various measures of novel object exploration in mice. Forty male C57BL/6J mice were handled by the experimenter or recei...