BACKGROUND The links between drug use and psychosis are of major aetiological and prognostic significance. Psychosis and drug dependence frequently co-occur within the prison population, providing the opportunity to study this link more closely. AIMS To explore the relationship between psychosis and drug dependence in a sample of prisoners. METHOD A total of 3142 prisoners were surveyed nat...

OBJECTIVE Environmental drug-related cues have been implicated as a cause of illicit heroin use during methadone maintenance treatment of heroin dependence. The authors sought to identify the functional neuroanatomy of the brain response to visual heroin-related stimuli in methadone maintenance patients. METHOD Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to compare brain resp...

Drug abuse is a serious public health problem. Moreover, co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders are common among drug users. This paper examines psychiatric disorders of young cocaine and heroin users using the World Mental Health Composite International Diagnostic Interview (WMH-CIDI). A cohort of 1266 young (18-30 years) current regular cocaine (705) and heroin (561) users w...

Introduction: Genes often have multiple polymorphisms that interact with each other and the environment in different individuals. Variability in the opioid receptors can influence opiate withdrawal and dependence. In humans, A118G Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) on μ-Opioid Receptor (MOR), 36 G>T in κ-Opioid Receptor (KOR), and T921C in the δ-Opioid Receptor (DOR) have been...

BACKGROUND Heroin dependence is a debilitating psychiatric disorder with complex inheritance. Since the dopaminergic system has a key role in rewarding mechanism of the brain, which is directly or indirectly targeted by most drugs of abuse, we focus on the effects and interactions among dopaminergic gene variants. OBJECTIVE To study the potential association between allelic variants of dopami...

Mu opioid receptors are critical for heroin dependence, and A118G SNP of the mu opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) has been linked with heroin abuse. In our population of European Caucasians (n = 118), approximately 90% of 118G allelic carriers were heroin users. Postmortem brain analyses showed the OPRM1 genotype associated with transcription, translation, and processing of the human striatal opioid...

AIMS To aid public health policymaking, we studied the cost-effectiveness of buprenorphine, naltrexone, and placebo interventions for heroin dependence in Malaysia. DESIGN We estimated the cost-effectiveness ratios of three treatments for heroin dependence. We used a microcosting methodology to determine fixed, variable, and societal costs of each intervention. Cost data were collected from i...

BACKGROUND This study examines changing patterns of past-year heroin use and heroin-related risk behaviors among individuals with nonmedical use of prescription opioids (NMUPO) by racial/ethnic groups in the United States. METHODS We used data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from 2002 to 2005 and 2008 to 2011, resulting in a total sample of N = 448,597. RESULTS Past-...

Heroin addiction, a chronic relapsing disorder characterized by excessive drug taking and seeking, requires constant psychotherapeutic and pharmacotherapeutic interventions to minimize the potential for further abuse. Vaccine strategies against many drugs of abuse are being developed that generate antibodies that bind drug in the bloodstream, preventing entry into the brain and nullifying psych...