University Launches Study on Prescription Drug Addiction Treatment

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is launching a new study to evaluate treatments for addiction to prescription painkillers and has openings for patients to enroll.

This is the first large-scale study to assess whether addiction to opioid painkillers, such as Vicodin and OxyContin, can effectively be treated with drug treatments currently used for heroin addiction.

The study is part of a national effort involving 11 clinical research centers to evaluate such therapies. Known as the Prescription Opiate Addiction Treatment Study, or POATS, it is being led by the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network, under the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA). UCSF is the only study site in Northern California.

The research is in response to the growing national problem of prescription drug abuse that has resulted in higher emergency room admissions and potentially devastating impacts on millions of Americans and their families, according to Stephen Dominy, MD, director of the Division of Substance Abuse and Addiction Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center, who is co-leading the UCSF portion of the study.

“The abuse of prescription opiates has become a very serious problem in our society, but until now, there have been no large-scale studies to evaluate how to treat those addictions,” Dominy said. “This study hopes to assess whether current opiate dependence therapies are effective, as well as the role of counseling in treatment outcomes.”

An estimated 2.2 million Americans aged 12 or older start using prescription pain relievers each year for non-medical uses, surpassing the number of new marijuana users (2.1 million), according to the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. In that survey, more than 6 million Americans reported using prescription drugs for non-medical uses in the previous month, which is more than the number abusing cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens and inhalants, combined.

Those users, however, seem to fit a very different profile from traditional patients in heroin dependence programs, according to Yong Song, co-principal investigator for the UCSF site study and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry in the UCSF School of Medicine. These users tend to be younger, he said, with fewer other dependency issues, such as alcohol or cocaine, and often come from a middle-class background.

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