Patients with symptoms of opiate withdrawal, after the administration of opiate antagonist by paramedics, are a common presentation in the emergency department of hospitals. Though most of opiate withdrawal symptoms are benign, rarely they can become life threatening. This case highlights how a benign opiate withdrawal symptom of hyperventilation led to severe respiratory alkalosis that degener...

addiction to the illicit and prescribed use of opiate is an alarming public health issue. studies on addictive disorders have demonstrated severe nutritional deficiencies in opiate abusers with behavioral, physiological and cognitive symptoms. opiate addiction is also link with a significant number of diseases including human immunodeficiency virus (hiv), hepatitis c virus (hcv) and other blood...

INTRODUCTION While several studies have identified an increased incidence of cardiovascular disorders in opiate dependence, neither opiates as a cardiovascular risk factor nor their effect on central arterial function has been considered. METHODS Pulse wave analysis (SphygmoCor, AtCorMedical Pty Limited, Sydney, NSW, Australia) was undertaken on a cohort of controls and opiate dependent patie...

BACKGROUND Because heroin supply changes cannot be measured directly, their impact on populations is poorly understood. British Columbia has experienced an injection drug use epidemic since the 1980s that resulted in 2,590 illicit drug deaths from 1990-1999. Since previous work indicates heroin seizures can correlate with supply and B.C. receives heroin only from Southeast Asia, this study exam...

Opiate analgesia, tolerance, and addiction are mediated by drug-induced activation of the mu opioid receptor. A fundamental question in addiction biology is why exogenous opiate drugs have a high liability for inducing tolerance and addiction while native ligands do not. Studies indicate that highly addictive opiate drugs such as morphine are deficient in their ability to induce the desensitiza...

AIMS To determine the cost-effectiveness of buprenorphine maintenance therapy for opiate addiction in the United States, particularly its effect on the HIV epidemic. DESIGN We developed a dynamic model to capture the effects of adding buprenorphine maintenance to the current opiate dependence treatment system. We evaluated incremental costs, including all health-care costs, and incremental ef...

The medical discipline of narcology in Russia is a subspecialty of psychiatry from the Soviet era and it is given warrant to define the scope of health activities with regard to alcohol and other drug use, drug users, and related problems. Narcological practice is in turn constrained by the State. The emergence of widespread injection opiate use and associated HIV morbidities and mortalities du...

It has been suggested that an increase firing rate of noradrenergic neurons of the locus ceruleus is responsible for the opiate withdrawal syndrome. However, lesion studies have indicated that the noradrenergic neurons of the locus ceruleus are not essential for either the expression or suppression by clonidine of opiate withdrawal. The present study was designed to determine the effect of the ...

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) comprises an important component in the neural circuitry underlying drug-related associative learning and memory processing. Neuronal activation within mPFC circuits is correlated with the recall of opiate-related drug-taking experiences in both humans and other animals. Using an unbiased associative place conditioning procedure, we recorded mPFC neuronal pop...