Aim: Substance abuse has become a universal crisis in our modern age. Among illegal substances, opium and its derivatives have been ranked second in terms of usage after cannabis in the world. In many Asian regions, the use of opium enjoys a high social acceptance; hence, some common people and even medical practitioners believe that opium lowers blood glucose and pressure and treat dyslipidemi...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the association between opium use and subsequent risk of death. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING The Golestan Cohort Study in north-eastern Iran collected detailed validated data on opium use and other exposures at baseline. Participants were enrolled between January 2004 and June 2008 and were followed to May 2011, with a follow-up success rate of over 99%...

BACKGROUND Although the triggering role of both opium use and elevated plasma homocysteine level for progressing atherosclerosis and, therefore, appearing coronary heart disease has been clearly determined, no study are available with respect to the relation between these to risk profiles. In the present study and for the first time, we hypothesized that the opium addiction can be potentially c...

VIRGINIA BERRIDGE and GRIFFITH EDWARDS, Opium and the people: Opiate use in nineteenth-century England, London, Allen Lane; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xxx, 369, £20.00. After reading Opium and the people, one is tempted to believe that opium was the religion of the masses. The drug was omnipresent in Victorian society. It was sold, without restriction, not only by chemists, bu...

The management of pain continues to be one of the most vexing of problems for health practitioners worldwide. The pain response is difficult to manage for multiple reasons: responses vary widely in their mechanism of action as well as anatomic location; individual responses to pain are variable; secondary gains can be had by individuals falsely claiming to be in pain; cultural differences in de...

In this article we present a method to speed up agglomerative clustering used in speaker diarization by using long-term prosodic features. A set of these features is used to decide which clusters should be merged. This strategy reduces the number of decisions that have to be performed using the more calculation-intensive method based on the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). We show a speedu...

The paper examines the rise and fall of Golden Triangle opium-producing region, by focusing on local economic social conditions, as well international factors that have affected opium production in Myanmar (formerly Burma), Laos, Thailand. By 1970, countries produced 70 percent world’s opium, but even late 1990s, figure remained 66 percent, only today has region become less significant, a resul...

OBJECTIVE To assess the reliability and validity of self-reported opium use in a rural Iranian population at high risk for esophageal cancer in preparation for a large cohort study. METHOD 1,057 subjects ages 33 to 84 years were recruited from Gonbad city and three surrounding villages in Golestan province of Iran and completed a questionnaire and provided biological samples. The history and ...

BACKGROUND The use of narcotics such as opium exposes addicts as susceptible targets of different diseases so that they might easily be exposed to different diseases such as fungal infections. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of addiction to opium and fungal infection on plasma levels of certain cytokines including interleukin-4 (IL-4), IL-6, IL-17, Interferon gamma (IFN-γ) an...

INTRODUCTION One of the newest non-occupational sources of lead contamination is drug addiction, which has recently been addressed as a major source of lead poisoning in some countries. The present study aimed to investigate the blood lead level (BLL) of asymptomatic opium addicts. METHODS This case-control study was conducted during a one-year period to compare BLL of three groups consisting...