BACKGROUND Opioid dependence increases risk of premature mortality. Opioid substitution therapy with methadone or buprenorphine reduces mortality risk, especially for drug-related overdose. Clinical guidelines recommend methadone as the first line of opioid substitution therapy. We aimed to test whether buprenorphine treatment has a lower mortality risk than does methadone treatment by comparin...

Approximately 10% of new HIV infections worldwide are attributable to injecting drug use, often of an opiate such as heroin. 1 Opioid substitution therapy supplies illicit drug users with a replacement drug, a prescribed medicine such as methadone or buprenorphine, which is usually administered orally in a supervised clinical setting. The effectiveness of this therapy is recognized in developed...

buprenorphine (subutex) has been used to treat opioid dependency in the past 16 years. subutex (or buprenorphine hydrochloride) was approved by the singapore's ministry of health (moh) in 2000 as a substitution treatment for opiate-dependent drug abusers within the framework of medical, social and psychological treatments. it was subsequently introduced into the singapore market in 2002. i...

Office-based buprenorphine-naloxone (Suboxone) treatment in the United States has significantly improved access to safe and effective opioid-dependence therapy. Little data from physicians' experiences prescribing Suboxone in private offices have been available. This retrospective chart review describes a family practitioner's first 2 years of clinical experience prescribing Suboxone for opioid...

The South-East Asia Region contains an estimated 400,000-500,000 people who inject drugs (PWID). HIV prevalence among PWID is commonly 20% or higher in Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and some regions of India. Opioid substitution therapy (OST) is an important HIV prevention intervention in this part of the world. However, key challenges and barriers to scale up of OST exist, including: pervasive ...

BACKGROUND Substance abuse and gambling problems are associated, however, studies on gambling problems among opioid substitution treatment (OST) patients are scarce. The aims of this study are to explore the association of gender, age, treatment medication and treatment program with gambling behaviour, including gambling participation and gambling problems, among OST patients. FINDINGS All OS...

PURPOSE: Opioid dependence (OD) is a serious and growing clinical condition with increasing social costs that requires expanding treatment beyond opioid agonist substitution. The opioid antagonist naltrexone has displayed a remarkable association of theoretical effectiveness and poor clinical utility in treating OD due to noncompliant behavior and low acceptability among patients, only partly m...

Recently, δ opioid receptor agonists have been proposed to be attractive targets for the development of novel antidepressants. Several studies revealed that single treatment of δ opioid receptor agonists produce antidepressant-like effects in the forced swimming test, which is one of the most popular animal models for screening antidepressants. In addition, subchronic treatment with δ opioid re...