Opioid-related drug overdoses cause 130 deaths per day in the U.S. Access to treatment and prevention programs are key to addressing the opioid crisis, as is access to overdose reversal drugs like naloxone, which has emerged ...
Jun 27, 2024
1
1
An international team of researchers has identified specific bacteria in the gut that are associated with both mice and humans developing an addiction to food that can lead to obesity. They have also identified bacteria that ...
Jun 26, 2024
0
26
For patients with schizophrenia, the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs13194504 AA genotype is associated with reduced severity of tardive dyskinesia (TD), but is not associated with occurrence, according to a study ...
Jun 25, 2024
0
0
In France, the majority of people with an opioid use disorder—87%—receive access to medication designed to treat it. In the United States, where more than 100,000 people are dying annually from drug overdoses, less than ...
Jun 20, 2024
0
0
When people get a prescription for the opioid addiction medication called buprenorphine, they almost always fill it—even if they have to pay more out of their own pocket, a new study shows. The paper is published in the ...
Jun 18, 2024
0
0
Our brains, even in adulthood, continually adapt to what we do, strengthening or weakening neural pathways as we practice new skills or abandon old habits. Now, research by Stanford Medicine scientists has found that a particular ...
Jun 5, 2024
0
26
Adolescents with an internet addiction undergo changes in the brain that could lead to additional addictive behavior and tendencies, finds a new study by UCL researchers.
Jun 4, 2024
0
45
Here in the rugged foothills of California's Sierra Nevada, the streets aren't littered with needles and dealers aren't hustling drugs on the corner.
May 29, 2024
0
0
A new study examining how state Medicaid programs are helping people with substance use disorders (SUD) uncovered the need to expand the programmatic features to assist individuals who are transitioning in and out of the ...
May 24, 2024
0
0
A coalition of researchers at The University of New Mexico have just taken a huge step forward for addiction research, in emphasizing a recovery process that has long been needed for a specific drug.
May 23, 2024
0
0
The term "addiction" is used in many contexts to describe an obsession, compulsion, or excessive psychological dependence, such as: drug addiction (e.g. alcoholism), video game addiction, crime, money, work addiction, compulsive overeating, problem gambling, computer addiction, nicotine addiction, pornography addiction, etc.
In medical terminology, an addiction is a chronic neurobiologic disorder that has genetic, psychosocial, and environmental dimensions and is characterized by one of the following: the continued use of a substance despite its detrimental effects, impaired control over the use of a drug (compulsive behavior), and preocupation with a drug's use for non-therapeutic purposes (i.e. craving the drug). Addiction is often accompanied the presence of deviant behaviors (for instance stealing money and forging prescriptions) that are used to obtain a drug.
Tolerance to a drug and physical dependence are not defining characteristics of addiction, although they typically accompany addiction to certain drugs. Tolerance is a pharmacologic phenomenon where the dose of a medication needs to be continually increase in order to maintain its desired effects. For instance, individuals with severe chronic pain taking opiate medications (like morphine) will need to continually increase the dose in order to maintain the drug's analgesic (pain-relieving) effects. Physical dependence is also a pharmacologic property and means that if a certain drug is abruptly discontinued, an individual will experience certain characteristic withdrawal signs and symptoms. Many drugs used for therapeutic purposes produce withdrawal symptoms when abruptly stopped, for instance oral steroids, certain antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and opiates.
However, common usage of the term addiction has spread to include psychological dependence. In this context, the term is used in drug addiction and substance abuse problems, but also refers to behaviors that are not generally recognized by the medical community as problems of addiction, such as compulsive overeating.
The term addiction is also sometimes applied to compulsions that are not substance-related, such as problem gambling and computer addiction. In these kinds of common usages, the term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences, as deemed by the user himself to his or her individual health, mental state or social life.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
