Feature Channels: Drugs and Drug Abuse

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

As more states consider legalizing recreational marijuana, University of Colorado researchers are launching a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to examine the impact legalization has on career fulfillment, family life, and substance use.

• share
• favorite_border

Using advanced machine learning, a cross disciplinary team of University of California San Diego researchers developed technology that mined Twitter to identify entities illegally selling prescription opioids online.

• share
• favorite_border

African-American men report an average of eight depressive symptoms in a month, with family support, mastery, self-esteem, chronic stressors and discrimination among the factors that are significant to their psychological health, according to a new study led by researchers at Georgia State University.

• share
• favorite_border

Survey data indicate that in recent years, teens have become far less likely to abuse alcohol, nicotine and illicit drugs, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Teens also are less likely to engage in behaviors like fighting and stealing, and the researchers believe the declines in substance use and delinquency are connected.

• share
• favorite_border

About a quarter of adults whose marijuana use is problematic in early adulthood have anxiety disorders in childhood and late adolescence, according to new data from Duke Health researchers.

• share
• favorite_border

Opioid-free general anesthesia is safe, effective and dramatically decreases postoperative nausea, according to a single-center study of more than 1,000 patients being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2017 annual meeting.

• share
• favorite_border

Over a Quarter of Teens Taking Adderall On Their Own Do Not Report Taking Amphetamine

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

While the breakneck upswing in opioid abuse has leveled off, it remains disturbingly high and does not appear to continue its decline, according to an analysis of national data presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2017 annual meeting.

• share
• favorite_border

Study is the first to examine progress in shifting to other therapies to combat pain

• share
• favorite_border

Health care costs for privately insured patients with alcoholic cirrhosis are nearly twice that of non‐alcoholic cirrhosis patients in the United States, according to research presented this week at The Liver Meeting® — held by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.

• share
• favorite_border

For many of the 2 million Americans addicted to opioids, getting good treatment and getting off prescription painkillers or heroin may seem like a far-off dream. But a new study suggests the answer could lie much closer to home, in the primary care clinics where they go for basic medical care.

• share
• favorite_border

The book, titled “Drinking, Drug Use and Addiction in the Autism Community,” explores why addiction is more common among individuals with ASD than it is within the general population and investigates how addiction and autism affect one another.

• share
• favorite_border

Surgeons performing 11 common operations can turn to a free new prescribing tool based on data about how many opioid painkillers patients across Michigan actually took after their operations.

• share
• favorite_border

Sometimes scientists do not see the value of sharing their knowledge and expertise with non-scientists and members of the public may believe that researchers enjoy a rarefied existence. This critical review addresses the important, yet limited gap that exists between these two realms by discussing the Spit for Science project. Spit4Science is a university-wide research undertaking at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) that focuses on alcohol and other drug use and related mental-health outcomes. It incorporates two forms of participatory research that have gained increasing attention in recent years, community-engaged research and citizen science.

• share
• favorite_border

Public Health Officials Leverage APL-Developed Disease-Surveillance System to Manage Opioid Epidemic

• share
• favorite_border

Youth show lower rates of substance misuse, including prescription opioid misuse, well after high school graduation if they have participated in prevention programs that follow the PROSPER model developed at Iowa State University.

• share
• favorite_border

Streamlining investigations and prosecutions of opiate dealers is goal of three-year U.S. Department of Justice-funded research

• share
• favorite_border

Following studies showing that cocaine influences the transcription and replication of HIV, Mudit Tyagi, PhD, at GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences, will lead a team researching the underlying mechanisms of that influence.

• share
• favorite_border

Clarity Science, a division of Safe Harbor Compliance and Clinical Services LLC, report results of the Institutional Review Board (IRB)- approved Optimizing Patient Experience and Response to Topical Analgesics (OPERA) Study which evaluated patients with chronic pain who were treated with topical analgesics.

• share
• favorite_border

The opioid epidemic has created a tragic surge in donor organs. But despite their safety record, hundreds of these organs that could save lives go unused, according to an analysis of transplant trends.

• share
• favorite_border

Individualized medicine — the concept of matching medical care precisely to each patient’s genes, lifestyle and environment is no longer just a theory. Experts in individualized medicine — also known as personalized or precision medicine — will be in Rochester Oct. 9-10, presenting the latest ways to apply precision medicine to all patients. They are available for interviews on groundbreaking discoveries at Individualizing Medicine 2017: Advancing Care Through Genomics, which will be held at Mayo Civic Center.

• share
• favorite_border

The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded $5 million to researchers at UCLA to develop a resource and data center for millions of pieces of research, lab samples, statistics and other data aimed at boosting research into the effects of substance abuse on HIV/AIDS.

• share
• favorite_border

Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and the University of Chicago Medicine will use a $1.13 million federal grant to study the opioid epidemic affecting the state’s 16 southernmost counties.

• share
• favorite_border

The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing has received a four-year federal grant to assist HIV-positive prisoners in Indonesia — a southeast Asian country where the number of new infections is increasing rapidly.

• share
• favorite_border

New class of drug may help treat cocaine and nicotine addiction

• share
• favorite_border

Opioid prescriptions from the emergency department (ED) are written for a shorter duration and smaller dose than those written elsewhere, shows new research led by Mayo Clinic. The study, published today in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, also demonstrates that patients who receive an opioid prescription in the ED are less likely to progress to long-term use.

• share
• favorite_border

Hackensack Meridian Health Bayshore Medical Center recently launched the Opioid Overdose Recovery Program (OORP) designed to help combat drug addiction in the Bayshore region. Made possible through a state grant and provided by the RWJBarnabas Health Institute for Prevention, the program is designed to provide peer-to-peer bedside counseling with the goal of getting individuals who have been reversed by Narcan into an appropriate treatment program following an opioid overdose.

• share
• favorite_border

In the 14th episode of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Planet Lex podcast series, host Dean Daniel Rodriguez talks to Charlie Bachtell, CEO of Cresco Labs, and Northwestern Law alumna Dina Rollman, chief counsel at Green Thumb Industries (GTI), about the complexities of the marijuana industry, including how Illinois has set a precedent for regulatory programs, the banking challenges facing cultivators and the battle for more research within the United States.

• share
• favorite_border

In an analysis of the epigenomes of people and mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Institutes of Health report that drinking alcohol may induce changes to a cholesterol-regulating gene.

• share
• favorite_border

A majority of Canadians over 65 think "deprescribing" should be a national government priority .

• share
• favorite_border

More than half of the states in the U.S. now allow some type of legal marijuana use, primarily medical marijuana. But, in a survey of medical residents and deans at the nation's medical schools, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that the majority of schools are not teaching their students about medical marijuana, and the majority of students don't feel prepared to discuss the subject with patients.

• share
• favorite_border

7.5M grant will fund research into preventing opioid overdoses and treating opioid dependency.

• share
• favorite_border

Use of MDMA or “Molly” is common in the electronic dance music scene, but research is showing that many Molly users are using other drugs unknowingly.

• share
• favorite_border

Mount Sinai researchers have identified unique structural, biological and chemical insights in the way different opioid drugs activate the receptors and specific signaling pathways responsible for the drug’s beneficial and adverse effects, according to a study to be published in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

• share
• favorite_border

Student combines interest in public health, pharmacy while meeting with recovering addicts in prison, assisting officer, non-profits

• share
• favorite_border

Mount Sinai researchers study if longtime cocaine users could benefit from a psychological technique that might help them quit

• share
• favorite_border

The Department of Psychiatry at Hackensack Meridian Health Jersey Shore University Medical Center will present Substance Use Disorders in 2017: Tackling the Opioid Epidemic & More on Wednesday, October 25, from 7:45 a.m. – 4 p.m. at the Sheraton Eatontown Hotel. Special guest, The Honorable Patrick J. Kennedy, Former Rhode Island Congressman and international advocate for the treatment of mental health and substance use disorders will deliver the keynote address.

• share
• favorite_border

This is the first nationally representative study in which current use of synthetic cannabinoids is examined. In this study, we found that 3% of high school seniors reported current use, and current users also tend to be current users of other drugs.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

Brief interventions in a primary care clinic can reduce patients’ risky substance use by 4.5 days per month — a 40 percent decline among the Latino patients surveyed — compared with people who did not receive the brief intervention.

• share
• favorite_border

Frequent e-cigarette use does help smokers quit — a finding that researchers say supports the use of e-cigarettes as a cessation aid for those trying to quit cigarette smoking. But, they note, an examination of a recent national survey uncovers important clues about who’s successful at quitting and why.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at University of Utah Health devised a system that allowed zebrafish to self-administer doses of hydrocodone, an opioid commonly prescribed to people for pain, to study drug dependency.

• share
• favorite_border

Substance abuse is a continuing problem in the U.S., particularly with heroin and other opioids, to the point of being an epidemic. Treatments exist, but far too often patients relapse with devastating impacts on themselves and those around them. Now, scientists report that they have made progress toward a vaccine against the effects of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, in combination with heroin.

• share
• favorite_border

Faculty members and graduate students from Indiana University Bloomington presented research findings this week at the 112th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, a four-day meeting in Montreal.

• share
• favorite_border

When communities face epidemics of drug abuse, a wave of infectious diseases often follows, including hepatitis and HIV. A new federally-funded program in southern West Virginia, led by West Virginia University, will seek to interrupt that cycle. 

• share
• favorite_border

African-Americans are more likely to experience debilitating migraine headaches than whites, but a new study probing the issue found no evidence of racial disparities in treatment practices. Instead, researchers report a different finding that affects everyone: opioid overuse.

• share
• favorite_border

The single biggest factor determining whether a patient is likely to use opioids long term may be the number of days’ supply initially prescribed, according to a study by UAMS researchers.