A study conducted by researchers from the University of Minnesota suggests that Naltrexone may help curb problem gambling in addition to alcoholism. The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, involved participants who reported gambling between 6 and 32 hours a week. 40% quit gambling for at least a month which is significantly higher than the placebo group which was 10%.

Other side effects reported include a significant decline in the intensity and frequency of the urge to gamble. Dr. Jon Grant, the study's author, says "Naltrexone isn't a cure for gambling, but does offer hope to problem gamblers."

For more information on gambling addiction, problem gambling, and their signs and treatment, visit www.addictionrecov.org

 

 

Massachusetts’s pioneering plan to provide universal health coverage is off to a good start and is heartening evidence that national health care reform may be possible if sufficient skill and determination are applied to forge a political consensus.

The state requires that all residents take out health insurance or suffer tax penalties if they don’t. It also requires employers to offer coverage to their workers or make alternative payments if they don’t. As it enters what could be a critical year in determining its viability, the plan can claim some substantial successes.

It has already covered some 350,000 of the uninsured — more than half of the roughly 650,000 residents who were estimated to be uninsured when the plan began in 2006. Two-thirds of the new enrollees signed up for subsidized coverage available to low-income people. The rest signed up for private commercial insurance, either through their employers, or on their own, or through a new “connector” organization that funnels people to unsubsidized private plans.

Critics — opponents of new entitlement programs are watching closely — are accurate when they say that coverage is hardly universal if 300,000 people still don’t have insurance. But the plan is in its early days. Enrollment has grown faster than expected, especially for a complex, newly established program.

The real test will come this year, when higher penalties for those who fail to get coverage will kick in and we will see whether coverage can really be made mandatory without sparking political resistance. So far, polls show increasing public support.

Massachusetts has also held premium increases in the unsubsidized component of the program to 5 percent, far less than the previous double-digit increases. It has reformed the costly individual insurance market so that everyone can now get insurance at low group rates — an opportunity unavailable elsewhere.

Two of the original concerns — that people might drop private insurance to gain subsidized coverage or that businesses might dump employees on the state program — have not materialized. On the downside, many of the newly insured reported difficulty finding a primary care physician, and the share of low-income residents using emergency rooms for nonemergency care rose slightly, the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

The chief criticism, however, is that costs have risen faster than the original projections, forcing the state to raise its spending estimates for the current fiscal year from $472 million to $625 million and from $725 million to $869 million for next year. The shortfall occurred mostly because the state underestimated the number of uninsured residents and how fast low-income people would sign up for subsidized coverage. It is a warning to other states to keep projections realistic.

The key challenge will be to keep costs under control and find new sources of revenue while maintaining widespread support for the program. How well Massachusetts handles that challenge will determine whether its pioneering health plan falls into a financial pit or points the way toward universal coverage.

 

MONDAY, June 16 (HealthDay News) - Good news for coffee lovers: Drinking up to six cups a day of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee daily won't shorten your life span, a new study shows.

In fact, coffee might even help the heart, especially for women, the researchers found.

"Our results suggest that long-term, regular coffee consumption does not increase the risk of death and probably has several beneficial effects on health," said lead researcher Dr. Esther Lopez-Garcia, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Autonoma University in Madrid, Spain.

Her team published its findings in the June 17 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Lopez-Garcia stressed that the findings may only hold true only for healthy folk. "People with any disease or condition should ask their doctor about their risk, because caffeine still has an acute effect on short-term increase of blood pressure," she said.

In the study, the Spanish team looked at the relationships between coffee drinking and the risks of dying from heart disease, cancer, or any cause in almost 42,000 men who participated in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and more than 84,000 women who had participated in the Nurses' Health Study. At the study start, all participants were free of heart disease and cancer.

The participants completed questionnaires every two to four years, including information about their coffee drinking, other dietary habits, smoking and health conditions. The research team looked at the frequency of death from any cause, death due to heart disease, and death due to cancer among people with different coffee-drinking habits, comparing them to those who didn't drink the brew. They also controlled for other risk factors, including diet, smoking and body size.

The researchers found that women who drank two or three cups of caffeinated coffee daily had a 25 percent lower risk of death from heart disease during the follow-up (from 1980 to 2004) than non-drinkers. Women also had an 18 percent lower death risk from a cause other than cancer or heart disease compared with non-coffee drinkers.

For men, drinking two to three cups of caffeinated coffee daily was a "wash" -- not associated with either an increased or a decreased risk of death during the follow up, from 1986 to 2004.

The lower death rate was mainly due to a lower risk for heart disease deaths, the researchers found, while no link was discovered for coffee drinking and cancer deaths. The relationship did not seem to be directly related to caffeine, according to the researchers, since those who drank decaf also had a lower death rate than those who didn't drink either kind of coffee.

In the past, studies have come up with mixed results on the health effects of coffee, with some finding coffee increased the risk of death and others not.

More recently, research has found coffee drinking linked with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes and some cancers, and preventing the development of cardiovascular disease, Lopez-Garcia said.

The strength of her current study, she said, includes the large number of participants and long follow-up period.

While the study is interesting, it does have its shortcomings, said Dr. Peter Galier, an internal medicine specialist, former chief of staff at Santa Monica UCLA and Orthopedic Hospital and associate professor of medicine at the University of California Los Angeles' David Geffen School of Medicine.

Self-reporting is one shortcoming, he said, because people may have under- or over-reported their coffee consumption, for instance.

"I think what this study tells us is not so much that coffee is the answer to everything," he said. But, rather, that some compounds, such as the antioxidants found in coffee, may be healthy.

Galier's advice for consumers: "I would tell them to weigh the subjective risk of their coffee consumption," he said. For instance, "if they love coffee, but it makes them jittery, and they can't sleep, the need to adjust it," he said. "Look at your symptoms," he tells patients. "If decaf is no problem, I wouldn't put a limit on that."

 

HealthNewsDigest.com) - Washington, D.C. – Today, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) released the latest analysis from the University of Mississippi’s Potency Monitoring Project, which revealed that levels of THC – the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana – have reached the highest-ever amounts since scientific analysis of the drug began in the late 1970s. According to the latest data on marijuana samples analyzed to date, the average amount of THC in seized samples has reached a new high of 9.6 percent. This compares to an average of just under 4 percent reported in 1983 and represents more than a doubling in the potency of the drug since that time.

As of March 15, 2008, the University of Mississippi’s marijuana Potency Monitoring Project has analyzed and compiled data on 62,797 cannabis samples, 1,302 hashish samples, and 468 hash oil samples confiscated by law enforcement agencies since 1975. In its most recent Quarterly Report, the highest concentration of THC found in a single marijuana sample during this period was 37.2 percent. About three-fourths of the cannabis samples acquired were from law enforcement seizures and purchases. The law enforcement seizures and purchases were obtained from 48 different states. The Potency Monitoring Project is funded through by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and has conducted an ongoing analysis of seized marijuana samples since 1976.

John Walters, Director of National Drug Control Policy and President Bush’s “Drug Czar” expressed serious concerns regarding this trend, “Baby boomer parents who still think marijuana is a harmless substance need to look at the facts. Marijuana potency has grown steeply over the past decade, with serious implications in particular for young people, who may be not only at increased risk for various psychological conditions, cognitive deficits, and respiratory problems, but are also at significantly higher risk for developing dependency on other drugs, such as cocaine and heroin than are non-smokers.”

“The increases in marijuana potency are of concern since they increase the likelihood of acute toxicity, including mental impairment,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Particularly worrisome is the possibility that the more potent THC might be more effective at triggering the changes in the brain that can lead to addiction; however, more research is needed to establish this link between higher THC potency and higher addiction risk.”

The increased potency of marijuana available in the United States corresponds with other troubling research showing links between marijuana use and mental illness. A new report released by ONDCP this last month entitled “Teen Marijuana Use Worsens Depression: An Analysis of Recent Data Shows ‘Self-Medicating’ Could Actually Make Things Worse,” shows that some teens are using drugs to alleviate feelings of depression ("self-medicating"), when in fact, using marijuana can compound the problem. The report shows a staggering two million teens felt depressed at some point during the past year, and depressed teens are more than twice as likely as non-depressed teens to have used marijuana during that same period. Depressed teens are also almost twice as likely to have used illicit drugs as non-depressed teens. They are also more than twice as likely as their peers to abuse or become dependent on marijuana.

Additionally, higher potency marijuana may be contributing to a substantial increase in the number of American teenagers in treatment for marijuana dependence. According to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), among Americans age 12 and older there are 14.8 million current (past-month; 6.0 percent) users of marijuana and 4.2 million Americans (1.7 percent) classified with dependency or abuse of marijuana. Additionally, the latest information from the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS, 2006), reports that 16.1% of drug treatment admissions were for marijuana as the primary drug of abuse. This compares to 6% in 1992. A similar trend is taking place in the Netherlands, where new data indicate that the number of people seeking assistance for cannabis there has risen, from 1,951 in 1994 to 6,544 in 2006 – a 235 percent increase.

To read the whole report visit. www.WhiteHouseDrugPolicy.gov

 

FRIDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) -- Boosting the level of a specific brain protein may rapidly halt excessive alcohol consumption, according to a new study done in animals.

University of California, San Francisco, researchers found that the excessive amounts of GDNF, or glial cell-derived neurotrophic factor, stopped the desire to drink alcohol in as little as 10 minutes when tested on rats. Other rodents that had been "rehabbed" to give up alcohol also did not suffer a relapse into heavy imbibing when reintroduced to alcohol and given a GDNF boost.

GDNF shows additional promise, because it does not appear to have any side effects or block other more normal "pleasure-seeking behaviors," such as craving sweets, the researchers report.

"Alcoholism is a devastating and costly psychiatric disease with enormous socioeconomic impact," senior study author Dorit Ron, the principal investigator at the UCSF-affiliated Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center, said in a prepared statement. "There is a tremendous need for therapies to treat alcohol abuse."
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"Unfortunately, only three drugs are currently approved to treat excessive drinking, and all have serious limitations. Our findings open the door to a promising new strategy to combat alcohol abuse, addiction and especially relapse," he said.

Gallo researchers reported in 2005 that increased levels of GDNF appeared to cut the craving for alcohol, but they did not know how fast or effective it might be. GDNF is also being studied as a treatment for Parkinson's disease.

The researchers are searching to find whether any FDA-approved drugs might stimulate GDNF activity in the brain. Only one orally delivered drug, developed for experiments in the pursuit of Parkinson's treatments, has been shown to raise brain GDNF levels in rats.

The findings were published in this week'sProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More information

The U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has more about alcohol abuse and alcoholism.

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration warned doctors Monday that prescribing a certain group of psychiatric drugs to seniors suffering from dementia can increase their risk of death.

Antipsychotic drugs are approved to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disease, but doctors frequently prescribe them to treat elderly patients with dementia.

FDA's announcement was an update to a 2005 action, when regulators added warnings about increased heart attacks and pneumonia to drugs called atypical antipsychotics. The medicines include blockbusters like Eli Lilly & Co.'s Zyprexa and Johnson & Johnson's Risperdal.

FDA said Monday those same risks apply to 11 older drugs known as typical antipsychotics, including Pfizer's Navane and Endo Pharmaceutical's Moban. The drugs were developed in the 1950s and have largely been replaced by the newer medications, which are believed to have fewer side effects, such as tremors.

Under FDA's orders, both drug types will now carry boxed warnings — the most serious a drug can carry — describing their risks to dementia patients.

Analysts did not expect the announcement to negatively impact drug company earnings because the original antipsychotics are available as low-cost generics.

Federal officials have repeatedly urged doctors not to medicate seniors unnecessarily. Despite such warnings, health professionals continue to prescribe psychiatric drugs "off-label," or for uses that have not been approved by FDA. About 20 percent of seniors in nursing homes who receive antipsychotics have not been diagnosed with psychiatric problems, according to data released by Medicare earlier this year.

While FDA regulates the approval and marketing of drugs, doctors are free to use their judgment when prescribing drugs.

The agency based its decision on two studies of a combined 65,000 seniors which showed those taking antipsychotics were more likely to die than those not on the drugs. Agency officials said it's not clear why antipsychotics hasten death. Scientists also could not determine from the data whether one group carries greater dangers than the other.

"We've struggled with this decision but we ultimately decided the data are strong enough to expand this label to drugs in both classes," said Thomas Laughren, director of FDA's psychiatric drug division.

The agency stressed there is "no approved drug for the treatment of dementia-related psychosis," and recommended doctors consider other treatment options.

"A lot of the things can be done to help change one's environment so elderly patients can be more oriented and engaged," said Dr. Eric Hollander, a professor at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.

Many of the behavioral problems seen in seniors can be improved with simple, daily routines that patients can follow, Hollander said.