OBJECTIVE To prospectively assess if opiate antagonist treatment or the opiate-free status could reverse opiate-related vasculopathy. DESIGN Longitudinal Open Observational, Serial 'N of One', over 6.5 years under various treatment conditions: opiate dependence, naltrexone and opiate-free. SETTING Primary care, Australia. PARTICIPANTS 20 opiate-dependent patients (16 males: 16 cases of bu...

Opiate reward memories are powerful triggers for compulsive opiate-seeking behaviors. The basolateral amygdala (BLA) is an important structure for the processing of opiate-related associative memories and is functionally linked to the mesolimbic dopamine (DA) pathway. Transmission through intra-BLA DA D1-like and D2-like receptors independently modulates the formation of opiate reward memories ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there are differences in overall and cause-specific mortality rates of opiate users in maintenance treatment and of opiate users not in any drug treatment program in Vienna, Austria. A cohort of opiate-users enrolled in maintenance treatment in Vienna and a cohort of individuals involved in opiate-related emergencies from 1995 to 1997 were re...

Background As opiate use has increased, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of opiate users presenting for treatment. Questions regarding the challenges of treating opiate users in residential treatment remain largely unanswered. This study seeks to determine what, if any, meaningful differences exist between opiate and non-opiate users, as well as within opiate users who ente...

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...

background increasing evidence indicates that opiate users and methadone maintenance patients (mmps) are impaired in executive control tasks and response inhibition behavior compared to healthy individuals; however, the cognitive functional difference between opiate addicts and mmps has not been clarified. objectives this study employed go/no-go tasks to evaluate the response inhibition behavio...

AIMS To describe important non-biological factors which influence the course of opiate addiction. METHOD Studies were reviewed that present empirical results on the long-term course of opiate addiction, progress of opiate addicts during and after treatment, variables that predict remission and abstinence, comparisons of treated and untreated samples, and recovery from opiate addiction without...

Escape from the extremely stressful opiate withdrawal syndrome may motivate opiate seeking and taking. The corticotropin-releasing factor receptor-1 (CRF1) pathway mediates behavioral and endocrine responses to stress. Here, we report that genetic inactivation (CRF1-/-) as well as pharmacological antagonism of the CRF/CRF1 receptor pathway increased and prolonged the somatic expression of opiat...

OBJECTIVE Adolescent-onset exposure to highly addictive substances such as opiates may induce far-reaching deleterious effects on later mental and physical health. However, little is known about the neurodevelopmental basis for adolescent-onset opiate dependence. Here we examined whether having an abnormally large cavum septum pellucidum (CSP), a putative marker of limbic structural maldevelopm...