The consequences of alcohol dependence concern serious health care, social and economic problems. The scope of many studies is to better understand mechanisms underlying alcohol addiction in order to work out new, more effective treatment strategies. Alcohol affects many neurotransmission systems within the brain. In general, acute alcohol enhances inhibitory transmission, up-regulating the GAB...

The aim of this study was to evaluate whether the number of women recruited for studies to establish the efficacy of medications approved for treatment of alcohol dependence (AD) and of alcohol withdrawal syndrome (AWS) is sufficient to reveal possible gender differences in the response to these medications and in suggesting the use of different doses in female patients. Our results show that t...

Recent preclinical and clinical studies have demonstrated that cotreatments with extremely low doses of opioid receptor antagonists can markedly enhance the ef®cacy and speci®city of morphine and related opioid analgesics. Our correlative studies of the cotreatment of nociceptive types of dorsal-root ganglion neurons in vitro and mice in vivo with morphine plus speci®c opioid receptor antagonis...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Numerous drugs have been used to prevent or to treat opioid-induced pruritus in the surgical setting. Their relative efficacy is not well understood. METHODS The methods employed involved the systematic search (MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane library, bibliographies, without language restriction, up to June 2000) for full reports of randomized comparisons of any interventio...