Medically Supervised Detox From Opiates

Many people believe that using medication in the treatment of substance use disorders is trading one addiction for another. However, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), use of FDA-approved medications in combination with evidence-based therapies can be effective in the treatment of addiction and may help recovering users stay in treatment longer, extending periods of sobriety and paving the way for successful recovery.

This combination of therapies is known as medication-assisted treatment, or MAT.

MAT is commonly integrated into treatment for opioid and alcohol substance use disorders.

Medication assisted treatment (MAT) is the use of medications in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies for the treatment of substance use disorders. A combination of medication and behavioral therapies is effective in the treatment of substance use disorders, and can help some people to sustain recovery.

Buprenorphine

Buprenorphine, which is a partial opioid agonist, is used to treat someone who is addicted to an opioid – whether the substance being abused is heroin or a prescription painkiller, such as OxyContin or Vicodin. Of the few medications used for opioid dependence, buprenorphine is the first that can be prescribed for and obtained directly from the doctor’s office. To date, other drugs used to treat opioid dependency – such as methadone – can only be administered in clinics.

This increased access for buprenorphine reflects a change in the level of urgency that the opioid epidemic presents to the medical community – one that demands broadened patient access to opioid dependency medication and other forms of treatment.

Buprenorphine isn’t prescribed in isolation; it’s one component of a comprehensive recovery program designed to address the patient’s individual needs.

Buprenorphine alone has potential for abuse and prescription diversion due to its opioid effects. However, formulations that contain a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone decrease the potential for abuse because naloxone otherwise blocks a robust opioid effect and, further, will initiate withdrawal symptoms if attempts are made to misuse it via injection.

When used properly, these buprenorphine-containing medications can both alleviate unpleasant opioid withdrawal and decrease associated cravings.

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Helpful Links:

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• From Samsha.gov: Medication-Assisted Treatment for Opioid Addiction – Facts for Families and Friends
• From Nursingworld.org: Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) for Opiate Dependence—It’s Not “Giving Drugs to Drug Addicts”
• From VA.org: From VA.org Understanding PTSD and Treatments
• From PsychiatryOnline.org: Anticraving medications for relapse prevention

More Helpful Links Here

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Meth In The Morning, Heroin At Night: Inside The Seesaw Struggle of Dual Addiction

In the 25 years since she snorted her first line of methamphetamine at a club in San Francisco, Kim has redefined “normal” many times. At first, she says, it seemed like meth brought her back to her true self — the person she was before her parents divorced, and before her stepfather moved in.

“I felt normal when I first did it, like, ‘Oh! There I am,’ ” she says.

Kim is 47 now and has been chasing “normal” her entire adult life. That chase has brought her to some dark places, so we agreed not to use her last name, at her request. For a long time, meth, known commonly as speed, was Kim’s drug of choice.

Then she added heroin to the mix. She tried it for the first time while she was in treatment for meth.

Read the complete article at NPR.org here ..

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source https://turningpointtreatmentcenter.com/meth-in-the-morning-heroin-at-night-inside-the-seesaw-struggle-of-dual-addiction-2/

Scientists Now Know How Sleep Cleans Toxins From the Brain

The synchronized brain waves of non-REM sleep may play a key role in preventing toxins from accumulating in a person’s brain.

Laura Lewis and her team of researchers have been putting in late nights in their Boston University lab. Lewis ran tests until around 3:00 in the morning, then ended up sleeping in the next day. It was like she had jet lag, she says, without changing time zones. It’s not that Lewis doesn’t appreciate the merits of a good night’s sleep. She does. But when you’re trying to map what’s happening in a slumbering human’s brain, you end up making some sacrifices. “It’s this great irony of sleep research,” she says. “You’re constrained by when people sleep.”

Her results, published today in the journal Science, show how our bodies clear toxins out of our brains while we sleep and could open new avenues for treating and preventing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

When we sleep our brains travel through several phases, from a light slumber to a deep sleep that feels like we’ve fallen unconscious, to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when we’re more likely to have dreams. Lewis’ work looks at non-REM sleep, that deep phase which generally happens earlier in the night and which has already been associated with memory retention. One important 2013 study on mice showed that while the rodents slept, toxins like beta amyloid, which can contribute to Alzheimer’s disease, got swept away.

Lewis was curious how those toxins were cleared out and why that process only happened during sleep. She suspected that cerebrospinal fluid, a clear, water-like liquid that flows around the brain, might be involved. But she wasn’t sure what was unique about sleep. So her lab designed a study that measured several different variables at the same time.

Study participants had to lie down and fall asleep inside an MRI machine. To get realistic sleep cycles, the researchers had to run the tests at midnight, and they even asked subjects to stay up late the night before so people would be primed to drift off once the test began.

Lewis outfitted the participants with an EEG cap so she could look at the electrical currents flowing through their brains. Those currents showed her which stage of sleep the person was in. Meanwhile, the MRI measured the blood oxygen levels in their brains and showed how much cerebrospinal fluid was flowing in and out of the brain. “We had a sense each of these metrics was important, but how they change during sleep and how they relate to each other during sleep was uncharted territory for us,” she says.

What she discovered was that during non-REM sleep, large, slow waves of cerebrospinal fluid were washing over the brain. The EEG readings helped show why. During non-REM sleep, neurons start to synchronize, turning on and off at the same time. “First you would see this electrical wave where all the neurons would go quiet,” says Lewis. Because the neurons had all momentarily stopped firing, they didn’t need as much oxygen. That meant less blood would flow to the brain. But Lewis’s team also observed that cerebrospinal fluid would then rush in, filling in the space left behind.

“It’s a fantastic paper,” says Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester who led the 2013 study that first described how sleep can clear out toxins in mice. “I don’t think anybody in their wildest fantasy has really shown that the brain’s electrical activity is moving fluid. So that’s really exciting.”

One big contribution of the paper is it helps show that the systems Nedergaard has been studying in mice are present and hugely important for humans too. “It’s telling you sleep is not just to relax,” says Nedergaard. “Sleep is actually a very distinct function.” Neurons don’t all turn off at the same time when we’re awake. So brain blood levels don’t drop enough to allow substantial waves of cerebrospinal fluid to circulate around the brain and clear out all the metabolic byproducts that accumulate, like beta amyloid.

The study also could have clinical applications for treating Alzheimer’s. Recent attempts at developing medications have targeted beta amyloid. But drugs that looked promising at first all failed once they got into clinical trials. “This opens a new avenue,” says Nedergaard. Instead of trying to act on one particular molecule, new interventions might instead focus on increasing the amount of cerebrospinal fluid that washes over the brain.rain.

Read the complete article at Quartz.com here .. 

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