Current Drug Abuse Reviews - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2012

The alcohol hangover, i.e. the feeling of general misery the day after heavy drinking, is characterized by several symptoms including headache, tiredness, concentration problems, thirst, dizziness, nausea, cognitive impairment, and mood changes [1]. Already more than three thousand years ago the Susruta Samhita, an old Indian textbook on Vedic medicine, described the alcohol hangover state. It was called paramada and characterized by thirst, pain in the head and joints, heaviness of the body, and loss of taste [2]. The Susruta Samhita did not provide any treatment or cure for hangovers. Although alcohol hangovers are still the most commonly reported negative consequence of alcohol consumption [3], no effective treatment is available yet [4, 5]. Whereas treatments for most diseases have significantly improved over the past 3000 years, the alcohol hangover has been largely neglected by the scientific community. The reasons for this lack of attention are unclear, especially given the negative impact of alcohol hangover on daytime functioning. The latter is reflected by the fact that alcohol hangovers have significant socioeconomic consequences [6]. That is, hangovers may result in absenteeism and reduced productivity at work, increase the risk of injury, and cause people to fail to fulfill their social obligations [7-9]. Hence, from a financial and social perspective it would be wise to develop an effective hangover treatment, and it is therefore surprising that pharmaceutical companies have not been active in this research area. It has been suggested that it is unethical to develop an effective treatment for hangovers, because this may encourage alcohol consumption. A hangover is seen as a punishment for excessive alcohol consumption that prevents similar drinking behavior on future occasions. There is however no scientific evidence that supports this assumption. Whereas during the hangover state people often state they will “never drink again (...that much)”, reality learns that people do not learn from their mistakes. Hence, most people do not adapt their future drinking behavior after having experienced a hangover [10]. On the contrary, heavier drinking students overestimated the amount of alcohol they can consume without experiencing a next-day hangover [10]. There is considerable commercial interest in the alcohol hangover, given the large number of cures available on the internet. Although websites often claim that their product has proven to be effective in reducing the presence and severity of hangover symptoms, this is generally not true. In fact, placebo-controlled clinical trials examining the effectiveness of their products are lacking, or the product showed limited or no efficacy [4, 5]. As a result, no hangover treatment has been approved by FDA....

This review summarizes our current knowledge of the pharmacological treatment of substance use disorders and pathological gambling using data mainly from randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses regarding these randomized controlled trials. The review is restricted to the selection of first and second line pharmacological treatments for smoking, alcohol dependence, opioid dependence, cocaine dependence, cannabis dependence and pathological gambling. It is concluded that great progress has been made in the last three decades and that currently evidence-based pharmacological treatments are available for smoking cessation, alcohol and opioid dependence and pathological gambling. At the same time a series of existing and new pharmacological compounds are being tested in cocaine and cannabis dependence. The review concludes with a summary of additional strategies to increase the effect size of already available pharmacological interventions, including polypharmacy, combining pharmacotherapy with psychotherapy and psychosocial support, and improved patient-treatment matching.

Aim: The objective of this meta-analysis is to assess the data regarding changes in herbal cannabis potency over time (from 1970 to 2009). Methods: Systematic searches of 17 electronic scientific databases identified studies on this topic, within which 21 case series studies satisfied our inclusion criteria of reporting the mean tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) value per number of samples per year. No language, publication date, publication type or status restrictions were imposed. The study selection and data extraction processes were performed independently but uniformly by two authors, included screening, determination of eligibility and inclusion of the eligible studies in the systematic review, and a meta-analysis of the results on THC content in herbal cannabis samples. We considered papers and not monographic scientific publications, rejecting all studies that were not focused on the subject of this review. Results: Meta-analysis by year was performed on 21 studies containing 75 total mean THC observations from 1979 to 2009 using the random effects model. The results revealed much variability between studies. Further, there was a significant correlation between year and mean THC in herbal cannabis. The combined data indicated the correlation between year and mean THC in herbal cannabis, revealing a temporal trend of increasing potency (5% above the mean THC value in the Poisson regression analysis). Conclusions: The results of the analysis suggest that there has been a recent and consistent increase in cannabis potency worldwide.

Of particular interest in the psychosocial treatment of addictions is determining how much therapy is required to bring about behaviour change. Stepped care approaches, where non-responders to a less intensive therapy receive a more intensive intervention, aim to only provide intensive assistance to those who need it, thereby allocating therapeutic resources more efficiently. This paper provides a systematic review of stepped care models involving different levels of psychosocial intervention for the treatment of alcohol use disorders and smoking cessation. Five publications on alcohol and three on smoking were included in the review. Due to the heterogeneity of outcome measures, participant characteristics and interventions, a narrative review format was employed. Overall, little evidence was found to suggest that stepping up non-responders to more intensive therapy improved outcomes, a finding that could partially be attributed to a lack of power to find significant effects. In one study, the application of a stepped care approach was found to reduce treatment costs compared with usual care. There was some evidence that the greater differentiation between the intensity of the interventions offered at each step, the better the outcome. Further research is needed to evaluate the efficacy of stepped care approaches to providing psychosocial treatment, employing larger samples and/or consistent definitions of the nature of the interventions offered at each step, and assessing treatment response in a timely manner.

Constant refinement of opioid dependence (OD) therapies is a condition to promote treatment access and delivery. Among other applications, the partial opioid agonist buprenorphine has been studied to improve evidence-based interventions for the transfer of patients from opioid agonist to antagonist medications. This paper summarizes PubMedsearched clinical investigations and conference papers on the transition from methadone maintenance to buprenorphine and from buprenorphine to naltrexone, discussing challenges and advances. The majority of the 26 studies we examined were uncontrolled investigations. Many small clinical trials have demonstrated the feasibility of in- or outpatient transfer to buprenorphine from low to moderate methadone doses (up to 60-70 mg). Results on the conversion from higher methadone doses, on the other hand, indicate significant withdrawal discomfort, and need for ancillary medications and inpatient treatment. Tapering high methadone doses before the transfer to buprenorphine is not without discomfort and the risk of relapse. The transition buprenorphine-naltrexone has been explored in several pilot studies, and a number of treatment methods to reduce withdrawal intensity warrant further investigation, including the co-administration of buprenorphine and naltrexone. Outpatient transfer protocols using buprenorphine, and direct comparisons with other modalities of transitioning from opioid agonist to antagonist medications are limited. Given its potential salience, the information gathered should be used in larger clinical trials on short and long-term outcomes of opioid agonist-antagonist transition treatments. Future studies should also test new pharmacological mechanisms to help reduce physical dependence, and identify individualized approaches, including the use of pharmacogenetics and long-acting opioid agonist and antagonist formulations.

Good laboratory practice in toxicological analysis requires pre-analytical steps for collection of detailed information related to the suspected poisoning episodes, including biological and non-biological circumstantial evidences, which should be carefully scrutinized. This procedure provides great help to unveil the suspected cause of poisoning, to select the appropriate and correct samples to be analyzed and can facilitate the decision about the analytical techniques to perform. This implies a good knowledge of the signs related to acute and chronic intoxications by drugs of abuse. In this manuscript we highlight and discuss clinical and forensic imaging related to cocaine abuse, namely the midline destructive lesion, dental health, pseudoscleradermatous triad and crack hands, necrosis and gangrene of extremities and several other skin manifestations, reticular purpura, intracerebral and peripheral hemorrhages, angioneurotic edema, rhabdomyolysis, and crack lung. For this purpose, the state of the art on this topic is discussed, using clinical and forensic cases from our professional database in complement to images and mechanistic data from literature.