Understanding Addictions

CAMDEN (Sep 22): “Understanding Addictions” will be the subject of a free evening program open to anyone in the Midcoast area and presented by the First Congregational Church, Camden, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursday, September 25.

“’Understanding Addictions” is intended both for people who may be suffering from an addiction and for individuals who would like to be more helpful to a family member or a friend who is struggling with addiction,” said program leader, Mary Ellen Ostherr who works as a substance abuse therapist for Mid-Coast Mental Health and also has a private practice. She has worked in the field helping individuals and families with substance abuse and recovery for 15 years.

“Part of the program will be about how to understand the signs of addiction and what you can do about it as a friend or family member. The program will also cover how to recognize enabling behaviors and what to do to help stop those behaviors that can contribute to someone’s addiction,” she said. “An important part of the program will cover how we can reach out and help others.”

Denial—how to recognize it and how to deal with it as a friend or family member will also be covered, Ostherr said.

Maine currently leads the nation in per capita addiction to opiates and the state is number two in alcohol addiction. Factors that make the problem worse for the people of Maine, she said, include the long winters, the ready availability of drugs and alcohol, and the high risk nature of some jobs in Maine.

It is easy to get hurt and take prescription drugs as part of the rehabilitation, she said. Good people can find that weeks later they may develop an addiction. Another factor is the Internet. There are now websites that make it all too easy to get prescription medications. Some of these websites have doctors standing by who will write the prescription.

“Understanding Addictions” is offered through the “Live and Learn” series of free seminars and workshops presented for residents of the Midcoast area by the First Congregational Church, Camden.

“Understanding Addictions” will be held in the Mayflower Room of the church at 55 Elm Street in Camden. Participants should park in the Church parking lot behind the Church and enter through the door on the parking lot side. The Church is handicapped accessible.
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source: http://waldo.villagesoup.com/

Younger drinkers risk ruining their lives

As a college president, I have many reasons to be concerned about the consumption of alcohol by my students. Perhaps the most clear-cut reasons are legal. Students who consume alcohol under the age of 21 are breaking state law. Furthermore, even those who are of legal drinking age might cause civil liability to accrue to the college if they drink to excess and cause harm to themselves or others.

However, the most important issues surrounding excessive and underage student drinking are, for me and my fellow presidents, not legal. Of much greater concern are the potential adverse consequences to the students themselves. Nationally almost 2,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die each year from unintentional injuries in which alcohol was a factor. Additional hundreds of thousands of students are injured; many of them seriously. These deaths and injuries are avoidable.

Every empirical study I have seen in 25 years of studying the issue in Canada and the United States confirms that there is a direct relationship between the legal drinking age and the incidence of alcohol-related death and injury. For that reason, I would not support any reduction in the legal drinking age. This was one of the alternatives posited by the Amethyst Initiative as a way of combating underage and binge drinking. It is unfortunate that the drinking age has attracted the most attention, especially since it seems doubtful that lowering the drinking age would lead to any appreciable amelioration of the most serious consequences.

In the first place, patterns of high-risk drinking behavior are already typically well-established before students arrive at college. Findings from the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, published in the Journal of American College Health (Volume 50, No.5, 223-236), state that in 2001, 43.6 percent of underage college students were classified as binge drinkers, meaning consumption of at least five drinks in a row for men or four drinks in a row for women during the two weeks before completion of the study questionnaire. The vast majority of these began drinking in high school and, increasingly, underage drinking and binge drinking are regularly occurring as low as the eighth grade or earlier.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse has found that the reported first use of alcohol went from age 17 1/2 in 1965 to 14 in 2003. Research further shows that the earlier students begin consuming alcohol, the more likely they will engage in behavior harmful to themselves and others.

Clearly this problem is as wide-ranging as the adverse consequences it brings about. Unsafe sexual practices, sexual abuse, health problems, drunk driving, property damage, vandalism, assault and alcohol dependence can all be added to the list.

And then there is the often less visible but very real matter of academic consequences. In the 1980s I reviewed thousands of files from students applying to Canadian law schools. Hundreds of those revealed a similar pattern: poor grades in the freshman year, a modest GPA increase in the sophomore year and then substantial improvement in the junior and senior years. Usually no explanation would be given for this other than a vague reference to "problems of adjustment."

Requests for a more detailed explanation typically yielded a rueful account of how the first year and a half of college were spent in a beery fog before reality intervened. Sadly too late for those whose grades, averaged over four years, were uncompetitive for law school or graduate school and who had to lower their expectations as a result. What a waste of human capital, individually sad but cumulatively tragic.

How do we as a society deal with this? Senate President Richard Codey has asked New Jersey's colleges to provide details of their alcohol policies. It is a fair request and one to which we should be glad to respond given the extensive policy frameworks, policing regimens, educational programs and health intervention measures we have developed. More importantly, it holds out the opportunity to frame the discussion properly.

Why are so many — but by no means all — college students acculturated to abusing alcohol? It can't just be about "adjustment" and new-found freedom since many of our students are sophisticated and experienced in ways that previous generations were not. We also need to go further and ask why alcohol abuse has been matched by a similar abuse of prescription pain relievers, tranquilizers, stimulants and sedatives. And why are these drugs so accessible?

I and my fellow presidents look forward to making progress in answering these questions.
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Dr. Peter P. Mercer is president of Ramapo College of New Jersey.
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source: My Central Jersey, http://www.mycentraljersey.com

Drug addicts shun mobile needle exchange

Far fewer needles handed out and returned since fixed-site exchange was closed

Victoria's mobile needle exchange is handing out far fewer needles to addicts than its fixed-site predecessor, statistics released yesterday show.

The experiences of Peter, who has used both services, might explain why.

Before the Cormorant Street needle exchange closed on May 31, Peter picked up a supply of clean needles every day.

"I had my routine of going down there," the 32-year-old cocaine and heroin addict, who declined to give his last name, said last night as he sat on the grass outside the Our Place shelter on Pandora Avenue. "Now I have to chase the mobile exchange all over the streets in a 10-block radius and I miss them sometimes and I end up going without clean needles."

Needle exchanges are promoted as a service that reduces the spread of disease among addicts by providing them with clean syringes to inject their drugs. But critics have also suggested that exchanges encourage illicit drug use.

A report released yesterday shows the number of needles supplied by the mobile exchange is down 23 per cent, from about 35,000 a month at the fixed site to 27,000 in August from the mobile unit.

Needles returned amount to just 40 per cent of those going out, a sharp drop from the 70 per cent return rate at the Cormorant Street exchange.

The figures were released by the Vancouver Island Health Authority and AIDS Vancouver Island in a summary of the first three months of the mobile service.

The Cormorant Street needle exchange closed after neighbours complained about illegal drug activity. The mobile service is supposed to be a stop-gap measure until a new permanent site can be located.

A decrease in needles coming back could indicate a number of things, said Katrina Jensen, executive director for AIDS Vancouver Island. "There are a number of factors, one is that they're disposing of them in other ways, like putting them in the garbage," said Jensen. Another possibility is that clients are keeping them and haven't used them yet, she said.

"Some clients may be taking extra syringes to keep them going for several months, and that's why we're not seeing those ones come back. It could also be that clients are using their own syringes and refusing ours."

There haven't been reports of a spike in the number of syringes discarded on the streets, said Jensen.

Aside from the syringes, clients aren't taking part in counselling services to the extent they did at the permanent site. There is no privacy and those working on the mobile service don't have the time, said Jensen.

"Due to the public nature of the mobile service a lot of clients aren't comfortable engaging in long conversations with workers. They just want to get their stuff and be gone."

Concern is mounting over how the mobile service will fare when cooler weather sends illicit drug users indoors, Jensen said.

Victoria Coun. Charlayne Thornton-Joe is concerned by the decrease in the number of needles exchanged by the mobile service.

"It concerns me that a major city does not have a fixed site," Thornton-Joe said. "It's a loss. I've always been an advocate for a fixed site which offers support and services."

Thornton-Joe has discussed the issue at meetings with the Downtown Service Providers and the clean and safe committee of the Downtown Victoria Business Association.

Thornton-Joe would like to see statistics from other local groups who hand out or take back needles. Some groups take in needles, but don't give them out, she explained.

The councillor would also like to see statistics on addicts' increased use of crack pipes, instead of needles.

"I'm hearing from street nurses that people are re-using needles and health issues are going to increase because of that," said Thornton-Joe.

Back on the grass outside Our Place, Peter pulled up his pant leg to show an abscess on his leg that became infected two weeks ago after he injected drugs with a dirty needle. The abscess required surgery at Royal Jubilee Hospital. But because he only runs into the mobile exchange service about every three days, Peter said he continues to put his health at risk.

"An hour ago, I had to use a dirty needle to suck dope out of a spoon and transfer it into another dirty needle and put it in my arm," he said.

Then by chance, five minutes before speaking to the Times Colonist, Peter ran into the mobile needle exchange and took a handful of syringes.

"Here's a lost soul looking for one right now," he said, handing a syringe to a young girl who sat down beside him. "If I don't give her one, she'll find one in the sewers."
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source: © Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008

Drinkers fall into 'nine groups'

The government believes it has identified nine types of heavy drinker as it launches a new alcohol campaign.

Research by the Department of Health in England with focus groups found heavy drinkers often fell into one of a number of categories.

These ranged from de-stress and depressed drinkers to people who boozed because of boredom or to bond.

Experts said helping people to understand the reasons for their drinking habits was "very useful".

The nine types of heavy drinker

The research showed that those drinking heavily - defined as consuming 35 units a week for women, 50 for men, which is twice the recommended limit - did so for a variety of reasons.

For example, de-stress drinkers were defined as people in pressured jobs who used alcohol to relax.

Whereas it said bonding drinkers could be anyone in society who had hectic social lives and lost track of their drinking.

The research was done to inform a new drive by ministers to crack down on heavy drinkers.

A pilot is being run in the north west of England over the coming months to specifically target heavy drinkers.

Over 900,000 households will receive leaflets through the post highlighting the link between drinking and conditions such as cancer and liver disease.

The campaign is focusing on adults aged over 35 who fall into the nine drinking categories.

Risk

Along with the information about disease risk, people will be given details about where they can go to get help.

This will include a website where they can calculate their own individual risk from drinking and get access to a self-help manual. A telephone helpline will also be set up.

The government hopes the tailored approach will help 4,000 people in the region to reduce their drinking within a year.

If it is successful, officials hope to roll it out to other parts of England.

Public health minister Dawn Primarolo admitted these heavy drinkers were a "tough one to crack".

But she added: "This is a totally fresh approach to helping people understand the effects of their drinking habits and help them make changes for the better."

Alcohol Concern chief executive Don Shenker said: "This type of marketing is very useful.

"In order to get people to examine their drinking they need to become aware of why they are doing it and what motivates them."

The Nine Types of Drinker

Name Characteristics Key motivations

Depressed drinker | Life in a state of crisis eg recently bereaved, divorced or in financial crisis | Alcohol is a comforter and a form of self-medication used to help them cope

De-stress drinker | Pressurised job or stressful home life leads to feelings of being out of control and burdened with responsibility | Alcohol is used to relax, unwind and calm down and to gain a sense of control when switching between work and personal life. Partners often support or reinforce behaviour by preparing drinks for them

Re-bonding drinker | Relevant to those with a very busy social calendar | Alcohol is the ‘shared connector' that unifies and gets them on the same level. They often forget the time and the amount they are consuming

Conformist drinker | Traditional guys who believe that going to the pub every night is ‘what men do' | Justify it as ‘me time'. The pub is their second home and they feel a strong sense of belonging and acceptance within this environment

Community drinker | Drink in fairly large social friendship groups | The sense of community forged through the pub-group. Drinking provides a sense of safety and security and gives their lives meaning. It also acts a social network

Boredom drinker | Typically single mums or recent divorcees with restricted social life | Drinking is company, making up for an absence of people. Drinking marks the end of the day, perhaps following the completion of chores

Macho drinker | Often feeling under-valued, disempowered and frustrated in important areas of their life | Have actively cultivated a strong ‘alpha male' that revolves around their drinking ‘prowess'. Drinking is driven by a constant need to assert their masculinity and status to themselves and others

Hedonistic drinker | Single, divorced and/or with grown up children | Drinking excessively is a way of visibly expressing their independence, freedom and ‘youthfulness' to themselves. Alcohol used to release inhibitions

Border dependents | Men who effectively live in the pub which, for them, is very much a home from home | A combination of motives, including boredom, the need to conform, and a general sense of malaise in their lives
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source: BBC News

Study finds mom's beliefs may impact their kids' alcohol use

Mothers, take note. If you really want to curb your teens' chances of using alcohol, help them develop a self-view that doesn't include drinking. According to a new Iowa State University study, the power of positive thinking by moms may limit their children's alcohol use. But beware. The opposite is also true.

"When mothers overestimated their teens' future use of alcohol, the teens developed the self-view that they were likely to drink alcohol in the future, which ultimately led them to drink more," said Stephanie Madon, an ISU associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study.

Madon collaborated on the study with ISU graduate students Ashley Buller, Kyle Scherr and Jennifer Willard; Max Guyll, an assistant professor of psychology; and Richard Spoth, director of the Partnerships in Prevention Science Institute at Iowa State. They analyzed data obtained from a series of interviews with nearly 800 Iowa mothers and their children over three to five years.

Their paper, "The Mediation of Mothers' Self-Fulfilling Effects on Their Children's Alcohol Use: Self-Verification, Informational Conformity, and Modeling Processes," was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a professional journal of the American Psychological Association.

Previous research found self-fulfilling prophecy

The team's previous research had found a link between a mother's belief about her child's likelihood of using alcohol and her child's actual use in junior high school and high school.

"We previously found that mothers' beliefs about their teen's future use of alcohol were about 50 percent correct and 50 percent incorrect, and that the incorrect portion of mothers' beliefs created a self-fulfilling prophecy -- teens behaved like their mothers had incorrectly expected them to," Madon said.

Their latest study builds upon those results.

"What we were trying to do in this paper was understand the mechanisms involved in the self-fulfilling prophecy process," Madon said. "We know that mothers have self-fulfilling effects on their kids' alcohol use through the past work that we've done. What we wanted to do here was understand 'How is that happening? What are the mechanisms that are creating that?'

"We derived our hypothesis from three large, well-known theories in the social/psychological literature -- self-verification theory, research on conformity and social learning theory as it pertains to modeling processes," she said.

According to Madon, self-verification theory proposes that people are motivated to confirm what they already believe to be true about themselves. The study found strong evidence that a mother's beliefs regarding her child's likelihood of using alcohol altered her child's self-view in either a positive or negative direction. The child then validated that new self-view by acting consistently with it later on.

"What people believe ultimately has an impact on what actually occurs," Madon said. "But it's not just because they believe it. It's not magic. When we believe something -- even if we're wrong -- when we believe it's true, we act as though it is. And sometimes when you act as though something's true, your behaviors will cause the belief to become true.

"So I think the moral here is to help children develop positive and pro-social self-concepts about themselves, because children are likely to make choices that match how they view themselves," she said.

Kids model their friends' drinking behavior

The study also found some evidence that modeling -- a tendency for people to learn by watching others -- may alter a child's alcohol use. Madon says they had a little bit of support for modeling as it related to friends' alcohol use.

"We hypothesized that mothers may influence who their children are friends with and that children may learn how to behave by watching what their friends do," she said.

But there was no evidence that children conformed their own belief to their mothers' on how acceptable it was for adolescents, in general, to use alcohol.

"How acceptable children thought it was for adolescents to drink alcohol was explained by their own self-views, not by their mothers' beliefs about them. And that's not surprising given that what you think about yourself is going to be strongly tied to what you think is acceptable behavior," Madon said.

She says that it's still a good idea for mothers to instill in their children the belief that adolescent alcohol use is unacceptable, since the study did show a direct effect of teens' perceptions regarding the acceptability of alcohol use on their own drinking.

"The more acceptable teens believed adolescent alcohol use was, the more alcohol they tended to drink themselves," Madon said.
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source: Iowa State University

Feeling thirsty or dying for drink?

It is Northern Ireland's drug of choice, but our relationship with alcohol can be problematic.

BBC presenter William Crawley has taken a look at the unique drink culture in the television documentary Dying For A Drink.

Made by Doubleband Films, director and producer Brian Henry Martin outlines the challenge set to the presenter.

As an experienced documentary filmmaker for Doubleband Films, I have made films over the past few years on many big and powerful subjects, everything from the Normandy landings on D-Day to the Heysel stadium disaster.

But no subject has daunted me more than what I faced in Dying for a Drink, this society's strange and obsessive relationship with alcohol.

Firstly, the question was where to begin?

From the outside, alcohol is this society's drug of choice, it lubricates every part of our lives. And then secondly, where to stop with such a huge subject?

Ultimately, the answer for our documentary Dying For A Drink lay in the approach.

We wanted to take the issue of this society's relationship with alcohol out of the daily news, out of the tabloid headlines and take a more measured approach. But is our drinking already out of control?

The use and abuse of alcohol is a rapidly growing problem in Northern Ireland.

We have doubled the amount of alcohol we drink in 20 years, the number of alcohol related deaths has also doubled in the same period and we have cut the price of alcohol, so that it is now cheaper in some cases than water.

In this timely, authored documentary, William Crawley sets out on a personal journey to explore our curious and frequently unhealthy relationship with alcohol and to consider the impact that it has on us all - as individuals and as a society.

William meets people from all sides of the alcohol debate, who talk frankly about how alcohol has affected their lives.

These are ordinary people with extraordinary attitudes towards drink; people like young teenage pioneers taking the pledge never to drink alcohol for the rest of their lives; people like the chronic alcoholics of a wet hostel whose drastic drinking habits reveal a lifetime's addiction and people like the sophisticated drinkers at a social wine tasting who drink alcohol not for the affect but for the taste.

Along with leading medical experts in Northern Ireland like Dr Neil McDougall, Consultant Hepatologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Dr Cathal Cassidy from the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Professor Mahen Varma, Consultant Cardiologist, at the Erne Hospital, these range of people with very different experiences and opinions provide the film with a revealing perspective on our relationship with alcohol.

It was important for me as a filmmaker, to set William a personal challenge over the course of the film.

His challenge was to abstain from alcohol for one month; five completely dry weeks.

We wanted to see what happens when someone in our society completely removes alcohol from their lives. The challenge proved to be more difficult and life changing than William first thought.

For the month long booze free challenge William recorded his own tee-total video diary at home with both surprising and compelling results.

And at the end of the abstaining challenge - and the film - William has the choice to drink alcohol again or not.

On the final day of filming, when William was poured a pint of the finest Hilden Brewery beer, we genuinely did not know what decision he was going to make.

For me, the biggest revelation from this journey to the bottom of the bottle - was this society's all or nothing attitude towards alcohol.

We are one of the largest consumers of alcohol in Europe with an ever increasing binge drinking problem, but also with a record number of teetotallers, people young and old completely abstaining from alcohol.

It would appear that the middle ground, which some of us may have witnessed abroad, responsible, enjoyable, healthier drinking (maybe even with food around the family table!) has passed most of us in Northern Ireland by.

Dying For a Drink is a documentary that will touch the lives of practically all viewers, as it is about the role that alcohol has in all our lives.

We want this film not to be the end of the discussion, but to be the starting point for a debate about our relationship with alcohol.
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source: BBC News

New Drug Arrests Alcohol Addiction in Rats

A compound with fewer side effects offers hope that alcoholism could one day be cured by a pill.

More than 15 million Americans drink too much, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. New research on rats may help them curb that addiction.

At present, there are three approved drugs for battling alcoholism, none of which work very well. Among them: naltrexone, which is effective for some alcoholics (as well as opiate addicts) because it blocks a pain pathway in the brain associated with the pleasures of drinking.

In an effort to boost its effectiveness, neuroscientist Selena Bartlett of the Ernest Gallo Clinic & Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues chemically manipulated naltrexone so that it cut off a related pleasure pathway in the brain. Their findings, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: rats (trained to crave alcohol) given the new compound, dubbed SoRI-9409, consumed half as much hooch. In addition, there were fewer side effects. Researchers say that unlike naltrexone, this drug did not diminish the animals' desire for water and other nonalcoholic beverages, such as sugar water. "It is much more selective in its effect on drinking," Bartlett says.

Rats given the drug for 28 days refrained from heavy drinking for another four weeks after they were taken off the drug. "That is currently the biggest challenge in alcoholism treatment," which relies primarily on rehabilitation centers, Bartlett notes. When people return home, they typically also return to drinking. "Drinking stays down without the drug in place. It's done something to permanently change and reduce the drinking."

Efficacy trials in humans are already ongoing for another drug known as varenicline, which, in addition to curbing smoking, also cuts drinking. But SoRI-9409 might prove more specifically focused on alcoholism as well as free of some of the side effects reported by those who use varenicline to stop their craving for nicotine.

"We've got a pipeline of different medications targeting different aspects of the disease," Bartlett says. "It's an exciting time for people that suffer from this disease as there are more treatments coming through. Once upon a time, this wasn't really considered possible."
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source: Scientific American

How to Decrease Your Chance of Becoming Addicted to Narcotic Painkillers

It's the patient's responsibility to find a doctor who knows how to screen for addiction.

The chance of becoming addicted to narcotic painkillers is around 1 in 500 when patients are properly screened before their doctors hand over a prescription, according to a 2008 meta-analysis that examined 2,500 chronic pain patients. With less careful screening, the risk can rise to 1 in 30.

The tricky part for pain patients, says David Fishbain, MD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami, is finding a doctor who knows how to do the screening.

The patient's responsibility

Pain patients are often bounced from family doctors to specialists and back, with no one taking the time to monitor their ongoing use of the medication, or to “qualify” them for what the medical profession calls chronic opioid analgesic therapy (COAT)—the taking of narcotic painkillers for a long period of time.

That means it falls to patients to find health-care practitioners who are experienced in working with chronic pain patients, so that the physicians are comfortable deciding both when to prescribe narcotics and how their use can be safely monitored.

The top warning signs of addiction risk are, not surprisingly, a history of illicit drug use or alcohol abuse in the patient or his family. But smoking is also on Dr. Fishbain’s radar, because “any addiction is a potential risk factor for another addiction.” And there's a long list of factors that may be less predictive but still relevant, including depression and anxiety disorders, which means that doctors need to consider the patient's entire history and not just how he or she answers a few targeted questions.

More work for the doctor

Once a patient is on COAT, physicians have to watch for behavior that may presage or signal addiction, which includes the use of multiple doctors and pharmacies for prescriptions, as well as calling in early for refills. Doctors often ask patients to sign narcotics contracts; they also may issue only short-term prescriptions, and some docs even require urine tests.

So having a patient on narcotics is a lot of work for a careful doctor, and that, Dr. Fishbain says, explains why family doctors, also known as general practitioners (GPs), can feel caught in the middle.

“GPs are in the unfortunate position of having patients who have been put on COAT by specialists," he says. "But the specialists don’t have the time to [screen and monitor]; they want to do more invasive procedures [such as back surgery], so they send the patients back to the GPs. The GPs then have the patients but don’t know what to do.”

This all adds up to a lot of narcotic prescriptions being prescribed by poorly informed doctors, says Dr. Fishbain.

How to find the right care

“You should try to find a physician who has experience in pain management and who has experience in chronic opioid analgesic therapy," recommends Dr. Fishbain. "They need to be up on the literature and aware of the screening.”

In other words, the educated patient has to do his own screening to find the educated doctor. Referrals—to a pain clinic, for example—are reassuring, but there’s no substitute for asking questions up front and starting out with a GP who knows how to prescribe for chronic pain.
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source: health.com

Novel Compound Shows Promise for Treatment of Alcoholism

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Sept 11, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- - Southern Research Institute and Gallo Research Center today announced that peer-reviewed results from a study testing Naltrexone-derived pyridomorphinan (SoRI-9409) will be published in the December 2008 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry. The publication is available online today at the journal's website, and suggests that a new compound that causes selective and long-lasting reduction in ethanol consumption might be a promising candidate as a novel treatment for alcoholism.

The article, "A Novel Delta Opioid Receptor Antagonist, SoRI-9409, Produces a Selective and Long-Lasting Decrease in Ethanol Consumption in Heavy-Drinking Rats" by Selena Bartlett, BPharm PhD, Director of Preclinical Development Group at the Gallo Research Center at University of California San Francisco, et al presents the effects of SoRI-9409 on ethanol consumption. These are promising developments for the treatment of alcoholism. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) estimates 15.1 million people are alcohol-abusing or alcohol-dependent individuals. There are currently only three FDA-approved options for the treatment of alcoholism.

The compound, SoRI-9409, was first designed and synthesized in Southern Research's Drug Discovery research division by Dr. Subramaniam (Sam) Ananthan under U.S. Government Grant DA008883. "Southern Research has been particularly interested in ligands that interact with opioid delta receptor subtype since such ligands hold promise as therapeutic agents for treatment of drug addictions and other disorders," said Dr. Ananthan, senior scientist and manager of Computational Chemistry and CNS Discovery Chemistry at Southern Research Institute. "The present findings by Dr. Bartlett and her group on the effect of SoRI-9409 on its ability to reduce alcohol intake not only provides us with a new drug lead, but also serves as the impetus for further research aimed at discovery of new therapeutic compounds for treating alcoholism and related disorders."

The Preclinical Development Group that Dr. Bartlett leads at the UCSF-affiliated Gallo Center was established to develop new treatments and bridge the gap between research and clinical treatment. The purpose of the study was to find improved compounds for the treatment of alcoholism. "The study results demonstrate that this compound causes selective and long-lasting reductions of ethanol consumption and suggests the compound might be a promising candidate as a novel treatment for alcoholism. This study indicates that compounds with a higher affinity for delta opioid receptors and reduced affinity for mu opioid receptors might be better treatment candidates than Naltrexone, the current FDA approved treatment for alcoholism", said Dr. Bartlett.

"The study on SoRI-9409 and alcohol cessation has yielded vital data that will help fuel novel treatments for a devastating and very difficult-to-treat illness," said Dr. Bartlett. "To date, we have considered and evaluated other compounds, and theories, but the information yielded from this study, along with previous research on this particular compound, has proven to be the most promising to date. We are looking forward to collaborating with our partner, Southern Research, to enter the next phase of research." The research was also supported by the State of California for Medical Research on Alcohol and Substance Abuse and Department of Defense.
Southern Research operates a successful drug discovery research program resulting in six FDA approved drugs with six additional drug candidates in late-stage preclinical and early clinical development.

"Much of our success stems from having a highly successful medicinal chemistry group, and seeking out collaborators who are driven to help us develop new lead compounds and bring those drugs to market," said David Harris, director of Business Development for the Drug Discovery Division at Southern Research. "We're happy to be working with Gallo on this promising new drug to treat alcohol addiction. It is another example of Southern Research's commitment to finding therapies for some of our society's most challenging diseases."

First author on the paper is Carsten Nielsen, PhD, a postdoctoral scientist working with Bartlett. Co-authors are Jeffrey A. Simms, Haley B. Pierson, Rui Li at the Gallo Clinic and Research Center and Surendra K. Saini and Subramaniam (Sam) Ananthan at Southern Research Institute.
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source: http://www.marketwatch.com

Painkiller Abuse Can Predispose Adolescents to Lifelong Addiction

Adolescent mice exposed to the painkiller Oxycontin can sustain lifelong and permanent changes in their reward system – changes that increase the drug’s euphoric properties and make such adolescents more vulnerable to the drug’s effects later in adulthood.

No child aspires to a lifetime of addiction. But their brains might. In new research to appear online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology this week, Rockefeller University researchers reveal that adolescent brains exposed to the painkiller Oxycontin can sustain lifelong and permanent changes in their reward system – changes that increase the drug’s euphoric properties and make such adolescents more vulnerable to the drug’s effects later in adulthood.

The research, led by Mary Jeanne Kreek, head of the Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases, is the first to directly compare levels of the chemical dopamine in adolescent and adult mice in response to increasing doses of the painkiller. Kreek, first author Yong Zhang, a research associate in the lab, and their colleagues found that adolescent mice self-administered Oxycontin less frequently than adults, suggesting that adolescents were more sensitive to its rewarding effects. These adolescent mice, when re-exposed to a low dose of the drug as adults, also had significantly higher dopamine levels in the brain’s reward center compared to adult mice newly exposed to the drug.

“Together, these results suggest that adolescents who abuse prescription pain killers may be tuning their brain to a lifelong battle with opiate addiction if they re-exposed themselves to the drug as adults,” says Kreek. ”The neurobiological changes seem to sensitize the brain to the drug’s powerfully rewarding properties.”

During adolescence, the brain undergoes marked changes. For example, the brain's reward pathway increases production of dopamine receptors until mid-adolescence and then either production declines or numbers of receptors decline. By abusing Oxycontin during this developmental period, adolescents may inadvertently trick the brain to keep more of those receptors than it really needs. If these receptors stick around and the adolescent is re-exposed to the drug as an adult, the rush of euphoria may be more addictive than the feeling experienced by adults who had never before tried the drug.

In contrast to illicit drug use among adolescents, the problem of nonmedical use of painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin has escalated in recent years, with the onset of abuse occurring most frequently in adolescents and young adults. Recent studies by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have shown that 11 percent of persons 12 years old or older have used a prescription opiate illicitly. “Despite the early use of these drugs in young people, little is known about how they differentially affect adolescent brains undergoing developmental change,” says Kreek. “These findings gives us a new perspective from which to develop better strategies for prevention and therapy.”

This research was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
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source: http://www.innovations-report.com