INTRODUCTION Opioid dependence is recorded as the most common drug of abuse in Malaysia. Currently, the preferred substitution therapy for most Government treatment centres is methadone used as substitution therapy for opioid dependence. There are, however patients who may benefit from being on the combined buprenorphine-naloxone formulation as substitution therapy instead. We discuss six cases...

BACKGROUND Management of opioid dependence is associated with many challenges such as the misuse of prescribed treatment and lack of medication adherence that can affect the clinical outcome of the patient. Buprenorphine-naloxone was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in October 2002 as the first outpatient treatment indicated for opioid dependence. There is only 1 report in the ...

A casual reader of the article by Kaur et al. in this issue of JMCP might find the results unimpressive for the intervention with buprenorphine-naloxone in 1 large managed care plan.1 Persistence with this intervention therapy to treat patients with a history of prescription opioid use was only 48% at month 1, 27% at month 6, and 20% at month 12. Even for the small proportion of patients persis...