Substance Abuse News and Research

RSS

Long-term deep meditation may help to regulate the gut microbiome for better health

Regular deep meditation, practiced for several years, may help to regulate the gut microbiome and potentially lower the risks of physical and mental ill health, finds a small comparative study published in the open access journal General Psychiatry.

17 Jan 2023

Study shows improved glucose control with fully closed-loop delivery of insulin in diabetics

Researchers investigated whether completely closed-loop insulin delivery could improve glycemic control among type 2 diabetes patients compared to regular insulin injections without any increase in hypoglycemia risks over 8.0 weeks of regular living.

13 Jan 2023

Combination therapy could be a safe choice for oral opioid maintenance treatment during pregnancy

Current guidelines recommend that pregnant women with opioid use disorder be prescribed either methadone or buprenorphine, but these drugs too have significant potential for abuse.

11 Jan 2023

Behavioral telehealth loses momentum without a regulatory boost

Controlled substances became a little less controlled during the pandemic. That benefited both patients (for their health) and telehealth startups (to make money).

10 Jan 2023

Brief tele-cognitive behavioral therapy for head and neck cancer survivors with body-image distress shows promising results

Talking, smiling, eating together – these are all social activities that are inherent to the human experience. But for some head and neck cancer survivors, they are dreaded tasks.

6 Jan 2023

Listening to icaros during ayahuasca ceremonies has a positive impact on men's addiction recovery

In Perú, music heals more than the soul. Traditional songs, known as icaros, are part of a treatment process for men rehabilitating from drug and alcohol addictions.

26 Dec 2022

Study finds higher mortality risk in patients with treatment resistant depression

Patients with treatment-resistant depression have a 23 per cent higher risk of death than other depressed patients. They also have twice as much outpatient care and spend three times the number of days in inpatient care.

15 Dec 2022

The therapeutic effects and safety of psychedelics

Psychedelics are reported to have rapid-onset and long-lasting therapeutic benefits after a single or few doses.

14 Dec 2022

In rural America, deadly costs of opioids outweigh the dollars tagged to address them

Tim Buck knows by heart how many people died from drug overdoses in his North Carolina county last year: 10. The year before it was 12 — an all-time high.

12 Dec 2022

Addiction treatment proponents urge rural clinicians to pitch in by prescribing medication

Andrea Storjohann is glad to see that she's becoming less of a rarity in rural America.

1 Dec 2022

Study reveals key details of how DREADD technology highjacks neuronal activity

Understanding of how neuronal activity modulates brain function is a key first step towards creating more effective drugs to treat a variety of neuropsychiatric illnesses, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, substance abuse, epilepsy, and others.

30 Nov 2022

COVID-19 lockdown did not cause a mass surge in dispensing of opioids, study finds

While some feared that New Yorkers would re-fill prescriptions to stockpile opioid medications in the early weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown much in the way people hoarded toilet paper, in fact, New York State opioid prescriptions declined in the period around the March 20, 2020 "PAUSE" order, according to new research.

28 Nov 2022

The player-coaches of addiction recovery work without boundaries

Sarah Wright stops by her peer support specialist's hotel room-turned-office in this Denver suburb several times a day.

16 Nov 2022

New fentanyl vaccine could prevent deadly opioid from entering the brain

A research team led by the University of Houston has developed a vaccine targeting the dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl that could block its ability to enter the brain, thus eliminating the drug's "high."

14 Nov 2022

Updated CDC guidelines for prescribing opioids

The United States Centers CDC updated their clinical practice guidelines for opioid prescription in pain management.

8 Nov 2022

New insight into how childhood traumas affect health outcomes

The social environments we grow up in are critical when determining our wellbeing and health later in life. Most Americans (67%) report experiencing at least one traumatic event in childhood, and a new study shows that these experiences have significant impacts on our health risks as adults.

8 Nov 2022

Intimate partner violence associated with higher risk of cardiovascular events or death

Experiencing a violent encounter even once with an intimate partner or family member may increase a young adult's risk of having a heart attack, stroke or a heart failure hospitalization years later, according to preliminary research to be presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2022.

31 Oct 2022

Startup receives federal grant for developing technology to detect and treat stress, anxiety

A high-tech startup that uses game-based interventions to help users identify stress- and anxiety-related events in real time and receive a personalized intervention has been awarded a federal grant to partially develop its technology through research at Purdue University's College of Engineering.

28 Oct 2022

Multiple outpatient visits are key to success opioid-use disorder treatment

People with opioid-use disorder who enter treatment are at risk for relapse, overdose or death if they engage in less than two outpatient visits in their first month of care, according to a study coauthored by Rutgers researchers.

26 Oct 2022

States opting out of a federal program that tracks teen behavior as youth mental health worsens

As the covid-19 pandemic worsened a mental health crisis among America's young people, a small group of states quietly withdrew from the nation's largest public effort to track concerning behaviors in high school students.