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A new University of Virginia study indicates that people who are married, or cohabitating, generally tend to drink less -- that's fewer drinks, and less frequently. The findings also show that singles are more inclined to drink more often, and in larger quantities. "Intimate relationships cause a decline in alcohol consumption" is the gist of the finding, according to lead study author Diana Dinescu, a UVA Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology. Her study -- conducted with other researchers at UVA, as well as at the University of Southern California and Washington State University -- compared the reported drinking patterns of twins in and out of relationships. The findings appear in the  Journal of Family Psychology . Previous studies have shown that married adults drink less than single or divorced people, and Dinescu and her colleagues examined the behaviors of 2,425 same-sex twin pairs to see if these findings held up among people who share genetic and familial...

A new review in  Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology , which explores the evidence, suggests this approach may be worth pursuing. Alcohol accounts for significant death and disability worldwide. Among those aged 20-39, nearly one-quarter of deaths can be attributed to alcohol, according to the World Health Organization. "The idea is that a small reduction in alcohol - - such as beer with four per cent ethanol content versus six per cent -- would reduce alcohol intake per drinker even if the same overall amount of beverage is consumed," says Dr. Jürgen Rehm, lead author and Director of the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Canada. A decrease in ethanol, the most harmful ingredient in alcoholic beverages, would be expected to lead to lower blood alcohol levels in drinkers. And this could reduce immediate harms such as injuries or accidents, as well as alcohol-related chronic diseases that deve...

The study used data on children under 18 and young adults 18-34 from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey covering all 50 states for the years 2006-2012. It found that minorities received much less of virtually all types of menta l health care , including visits to psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists, as well as substance abuse counseling and mental health counseling by pediatricians and other doctors. The research was led by Dr. Lyndonna Marrast, who was a fellow at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance when she initiated the study. Marrast is currently assistant professor of medicine at the Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine in New York. The study's co-authors are Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, professors at the City University of New York at Hunter College and lecturers at Harvard Medical School. Their findings include the following: Black and Latino children made, respectively, 37 percent and 49 percent fewer visits to psyc...

After changing little during the early 2000s, cocaine use in the USA began a downward shift at the time of the sodium permanganate regulation. In association with that regulation, there was an estimated decrease of approximately 1.9 million past-year cocaine users (a drop of 32%) and 0.7 million past-month cocaine users (-29%). During the period examined following the sodium permanganate regulation (December 2006 to December 2014), there was little or no recovery in the number of cocaine users. Methamphetamine use in the USA also began a downward shift at the time of the chemical company closure. In association with Mexico's 03/2007 chemical company closure, there was an estimated decrease of approximately half a million past-year methamphetamine users (-35%), and a decrease of a little more than a quarter million past-month methamphetamine users (-45%). During the period examined following closure of the chemical company (March 2007 to December 2014), methamphetamine user num...

A brand new technique of creating painkillers could result in various medicines with out the unintended effects, say researchers. Credit score: © stevecuk / Fotolia A global crew of researchers -- led by scientists at UC San Francisco, Stanford College, the College of North Carolina (UNC), and the Friedrich-Alexander College Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany -- has developed a brand new opioid drug candidate that blocks ache with out triggering the damaging unintended effects of present prescription painkillers. Their secret? Ranging from scratch -- with computational methods that allow them discover greater than 4 trillion completely different chemical interactions. In a brand new research -- printed on-line August 17, 2016 in  Nature  -- the researchers used the newly deciphered atomic construction of the mind's "morphine receptor" to custom-engineer a novel drug candidate that blocked ache as successfully as morphine in mouse experiments, however didn...

Prior experiments targeting this receptor, known as the TrkB receptor, produced results that differed greatly according to the brain region involved. The new study is the first to test system-wide delivery -- the way drugs are typically given in humans -- of a TrkB-blocker, s howing that the overall effect is to reverse cocaine dependency. "I think this study could help revive the idea of targeting TrkB signaling to treat addiction," said TSRI biologist Candice Contet, senior author of the study. Struggle to Find Solutions Scientists have long struggled to find an effective strategy against cocaine addiction, which is estimated to affect more than two million Americans, resulting annually in about half a million emergency room visits and hundreds of thousands of rehab facility admissions. There is still no FDA-approved drug specifically for treating cocaine addiction. Addiction researchers know tha t cocaine produces a huge surge in the levels of dopamine in the ...

Results of the study were recently published online in  Drug and Alcohol Dependence . "These findings come at a time when more people, including women, are turning to the use of medical cannabis for pain relief," said Ziva Cooper, PhD, associate professor of clinical neurobiology (in psychiatry) at CUMC. "Preclinical evidence has suggested that the experience of pain relief from cannabis-related products may vary between sexes , but no studies have been done to see if this is true in humans." In this study, the researchers analyzed data from two double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies looking at the analgesic effects of cannabis in 42 recreational marijuana smokers. After smoking the same amount of either an active or placebo form of cannabis, the participants immersed one hand in a a cold-water bath until the pain could no longer be tolerated. Following the immersion, the participants answered a short pain questionnaire. After smoking active cannabis, me...

The on-line survey of 941 respondents assessed subjective changes in respiratory symptoms in smokers who switched to vaping for at least two months. The results, published in the  Journal of Addiction Research & Therapy , show that 66 per cent of respondents reported an improvement in respiratory symptoms, 29 per cent reported no change and 5 per cent reported worsening. Senior author Professor Peter Hajek from QMUL said: "There is no doubt that e-cigarettes are much safer than conventional cigarettes, but smokers are still led to believe that they're dangerous. This misinformation includes a misreported study on rats that claimed that vaping may increase vulnerability to infections. These new findings from human vapers show that this is not the case. "The study needs to be interpreted with caution because it is based on self-reported data, and further studies using objective measures are needed. However, the present results provide sufficient information to sug...

he findings, published in the  Nature  journal  Neuropsychopharmacology  in August, show for the first time that morphine tolerance is due to an i nflammatory response prod uced in the brain. This brain inflammation is caused by the release of cytokines, chemical messengers in the body that trigger an immune response, similar to a viral infection. Researchers' results show blocking a particular cytokine eliminated morphine tolerance, and they were able to reduce the dose of morphine required to alleviate pain by half. "These results have important clinical implications for the treatment of pain and also addiction," said Lori Eidson, lead author and a graduate student in the laboratory of Dr. Anne Murphy in the Neuroscience Institute of Georgia State. "Until now, the precise underlying mechanism for opioid tolerance and its prevention have remained unknown." Over 67 percent of the United States population will experience chronic pain at some point in thei...

These are the questions being addressed by a team of researchers based at the Australian National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, Australia, who have analysed the tools used to identify substance abuse and addiction to understand how they contribute to or stabilise the realities of addiction. The researchers, Dr Robyn Dwyer and Dr Suzanne Fraser, writing in the journal  Health Sociology Review , identify five key processes by which the tools used to screen or diagnose addiction which help to establish, standardise and normalise an addiction within an individual. They conclude that some of the tools may contribute to establishing an addiction, and suggest further research into the choice of tools used. Dwyer and Fraser identify five key processes by which these tools can be analysed and considered to establish or standardise an addiction; reduction, expression, quantification, normalisation and populationisation. They believe that through these processes more and...