INTRODUCTION There is ongoing controversy regarding the appropriate use of narcotic analgesia for patients presenting frequently to the emergency department (ED) with subjective acute exacerbations of pain. "Are we treating pain or enabling addiction?" OBJECTIVES To determine whether the presence of specific factors could be used to identify adults complaining of acute exacerbations of pain f...

Addiction can be defined as drug-induced changes in the central nervous system (CNS) that produce maladaptive alterations in spontaneous behavior and in the behavioral response to readministration of that drug. Maladaptive behaviors include those identified as criteria for addiction in the DSM-IV. In general what most psychiatric metrics describe as addiction associated behaviors is the emergen...

illicit drug abuse continues to be a growing problem worldwide and a serious hazard to humanity. the crimes associated with drug abuse include sale or possession of drugs; property crimes or prostitution to support drug habits; and violent crimes reflecting out-of-control behavior. in fact, an offender drug use is involved in more than half of all violent crimes and in 60 to 80 percent of child...

Although a number of perspectives on drug addiction exist, this chapter focuses on drug addiction as a type of pathology of learning and memory systems, a viewpoint that has become increasingly common since the mid1990s. Both natural rewards and drugs of abuse appear to use the same systems within the brain to influence and reinforce behavior, and it is well known that these systems are involve...

results addiction potential was positively related to personality characteristics. we found that those with the highest addiction potential (47%) exhibited the following 3 traits: char­acteristics of schizophrenia, psychological exhaustion, and depression. conclusions there were no significant differences in the addiction potential among the students with respect to grade, field of study, age, ...

Drugs of abuse dynamically regulate adult neurogenesis, which appears important for some types of learning and memory. Interestingly, a major site of adult neurogenesis, the hippocampus, is important in the formation of drug-context associations and in the mediation of drug-taking and drug-seeking behaviors in animal models of addiction. Correlative evidence suggests an inverse relationship bet...

The involvement of the endocannabinoid system in drug addiction was initially studied by the use of compounds with different affinities for each cannabinoid receptor or for the proteins involved in endocannabinoids inactivation. The generation of genetically modified mice with selective mutations in these endocannabinoid system components has now provided important advances in establishing thei...

We investigated the association between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in ALDH2, which has been associated with alcohol dependence and several types of diseases, and the risk of drug addiction in a Chinese Han population. In a case-control study that included 692 cases and 700 healthy controls, eight SNPs in ALDH2 were selected and genotyped using the Sequenom MassARRAY platform. Odds r...

PURPOSE The aim of this investigation was to study the factors responsible for drug addiction amongst the inmates of Tabriz and Qom prisons, to further understand the reasons for drug abuse particularly in the young and find improved methods for combating these widespread problems. METHODS A multi-choice questionnaire was provided to inmates to potentially assess the reasons for their drug ad...

results the most common drug used by 48 women (81.35%) was th eopium, followed by crack(8.47%), heroin (1.69%), methadone (1.69%)and cannabis (1.69%). mean age of the first time experience of cigarette smoking was 17.11 ± 9.22 years. also, the mean age of the first time drug substance use was 27.62 ± 10.46 years and the mean duration of drug use was 5.2 ± 12.0 years. among studied women, 74.57%...