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Family Addiction – A Tough Nut to Crack
Guest author – Lisa Fredriksen from breakingthecycles.com: I was 49 years old when one of my loved ones entered a residential alcohol treatment program and I found myself plunged into a whole other world – a world that included terms and concepts like codependency, adult children of alcoholics, 12-step programs, co-addictions, dual diagnosis and the…
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About Addiction: Alcohol, drugs, marriage, taxes, and teens
You’ve come back and we love it! As a reward, we’re going to give you some of the best information about addiction on the web, free of charge. Really! No, seriously, we’re really happy to have you back learning about addiction here on A3. Now go on. Alcohol: Marriage, Sports Games, and Price Planning Science…
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Monitoring the Future by NIDA: Teen alcohol and drug use data from a national survey
One of the perks of being an alcohol, drug use, and addiction researcher, as well as of writing for a website like this and Psychology Today, is that sometimes we get to talk to people that most can’t reach or to receive information that others might not have access to. NIDA‘s Monitoring the Future, a…
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NIDA and ONDCP – American policy on addiction research
At this year’s College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) Annual Meeting, I got to hear, and talk to, some of the most influential players in the American addiction research field. Here are a few highlights from their talks and our discussion: Dr. Nora Volkow of NIDA talked about a shift from Genome Wide Association…
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Obesity, drug addiction, and dopamine
Eating junk-food can be addictive, and apparently, it causes brain changes that look eerily similar to drug addiction. That’s the message not only from the rapidly fattening waistlines of Americans everywhere, but also from the Johnson and Kenny labs at the Scripps Institute. Food and drug addiction The idea that obesity is caused by a…
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Talking to NIDA about addiction research- Nicotine, cocaine, treatment matching and more
It’s not everyday that I get an invite to speak with NIDA‘s director, Dr. Nora Volkow, and so, even though it required my creative use of some VOIP technology from a living room in Tel-Aviv, I logged onto a conference call led by the leading addiction researcher. When my colleagues, Dirk Hanson and Elizabeth Hartney,…
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Nicotine addiction and genetics – It’s the little things that matter in smoking addiction
We’ve known for a while that genes play a role in addiction in general and that nicotine is addictive at least in part because it activates receptors for a chemical called Acetylcholine (ACh) that are found all over the brain and body. Nevertheless, finding the specific mechanism for the genetic predisposition has been difficult. Some…
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How can you offer addiction help?
The question that seems to be on everybody’s mind (except perhaps that of the addict), is: SO HOW CAN I HELP ?!?!? – One of the first things you must do if you want to help someone with an addiction is to educate yourself. Obviously, you are already beginning the process by reading blogs like…
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About addiction treatment – Genetics, the new recovery frontier
Genetics are making their way into every facet of research nowadays, and addiction treatment is no slouch in that area. What is pharmacogenomics? If you haven’t heard of pharmacogenomics yet, you are sure to soon. The idea that medications affect individuals differently based on their unique genetic makeup has picked up a lot of steam…