Addictive behaviour

For the last 10 years the FIDES mission has promoted an addiction prevention policy within the Paris public hospitals group. It raises awareness among all hospital staff, provides the health professionals concerned access to comprehensive training in identifying addictive behaviour, offers support for all difficult situations and carries out studies into substance use practices.

Behavioural addiction is characterised by thoughts focused on a particular activity and its repetition, with a significant amount of time devoted to this activity at the expense of others. The nurse must adapt to these addicts by treating them as individuals without judging them and by trying to understand how they have tried, through this behaviour, to resolve their issues. The challenge is to reposition the body at the heart of the nursing relationship.

The French inter-ministerial mission for the fight against drugs and addictive behaviour (MILDECA) is responsible for coordinating the campaign against drugs and addictive practices. Thanks to a medical concept of these phenomena which has evolved towards a very broad definition of 'addictive practices', public policies are increasingly orientated towards prevention and health education. Specific structures and tools are available to health professionals to help improve their knowledge and the provision of care in this field...

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Impulsive-compulsive disorders in Parkinson's disease patients have been described as behavioural or substance addictions including pathological gambling or compulsive medication use of dopamine replacement therapy. A substantial gap remains in the understanding of these disorders. We previously demonstrated that the rewarding effect of the D2/D3 agonist pramipexole was enhanced after repeated exposure to L-dopa and alpha-synuclein mediated dopaminergic nigral loss with specific transcriptional signatures suggesting a key involvement of the glutamatergic pathway...

Addiction is a serious health problem which leads to general social impairment. The period of adolescence plays a significant role in drug abuse liability. Psychostimulants, such as modafinil (MOD), are majorly used by teenagers seeking improvements in cognition, which contributes to its indiscriminate use. The present study aimed to investigate the influence of MOD (64 mg/kg by gavage, once a day) treatment during adolescence (PND 28-42) on amphetamine (AMPH, 4 mg/kg i.p.) conditioned place preference (CPP) in early adulthood (PND 60)...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) within the ventral and dorsal striatum have been shown to regulate addiction-relevant behaviours. However, it is unclear how cocaine experience alone can alter the expression of addiction-relevant miRNAs within striatal subregions. Further, it is not known whether differential expression of miRNAs in the striatum contributes to individual differences in addiction vulnerability. We first examined the effect of cocaine self-administration on the expression of miR-101b, miR-137, miR-212 and miR-132 in nucleus accumbens core and nucleus accumbens shell (NAcSh), as well as dorsomedial striatum and dorsolateral striatum (DLS)...

BACKGROUND: The antidepressant bupropion has received increasing attention as a pharmacological tool to treat addiction although little is known about its effects on social behaviour in adolescents. The present study aimed to evaluate if environmental housing conditions influence bupropion's actions on social behaviour of adolescent mice. METHODS: Mice were either group- or individually housed for 2-weeks and then randomly divided into 2 cohorts: half of the mice remained in the initial housing condition and the other half were changed to isolated conditions for further 2-weeks...

The concept of food addiction (FA) remains controversial with research being in the nascent stages; FA like any addiction can have a devastating impact on the lives of those afflicted. There exists a clinical need for treatment strategies for those affected. This article reviews potential treatment strategies for FA. The treatment strategies target four core behaviours of the addiction phenotype specifically craving through the opioid system, impulsivity as a personality trait, compulsivity through the serotonergic system and lastly motivation through the dopaminergic system...

BACKGROUND: Men who have sex with men (MSM) constitute a risk group for sexual transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV. Despite counselling interventions, risk behaviour remains high. Syndemic theory holds that psychosocial problems often co-occur, interact and mutually reinforce each other, thereby increasing high risk behaviours and co-occurring diseases. Therefore, if co-occurring psychosocial problems were assessed and treated simultaneously, this might decrease high risk behaviour and disease...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: The current paper reviews recent research on perceptions of food addiction in the lay public. It also examines the potential consequences of such beliefs for eating behaviour. RECENT FINDINGS: Surveys suggest that, within community samples, the majority of individuals believe that certain foods are addictive, and that food addiction causes obesity. Further, many people believe themselves to be 'food addicts', and these individuals demonstrate increased patterns of aberrant eating...

BACKGROUND: Mass media interventions can be used as a way of delivering preventive health messages. They have the potential to reach and modify the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour of a large proportion of the community. OBJECTIVES: To assess the effects of mass media interventions on preventing smoking in young people, and whether it can reduce smoking uptake among youth (under 25 years), improve smoking attitudes, intentions and knowledge, improve self-efficacy/self-esteem, and improve perceptions about smoking, including the choice to follow positive role models...

The term food addiction (FA) denotes a concept among researchers and lay consumers as a behavioural phenotype related to excessive food consumption. In this study we examined the prevalence of FA using the validated Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) as well as the dimensional symptom count. In addition, we explored associations between participant characteristics and FA diagnosis. Outpatients attending a clozapine clinic and possessing a diagnosis of schizophrenia were invited to complete an anonymous survey using the YFAS...

Liability to develop drug addiction is heritable, but the precise contribution of non-Mendelian factors is not well understood. Here we separate male rats into addiction-like and non-addiction-like groups, based on their incentive motivation to seek cocaine. We find that the high incentive responding of the F0 generation could be transmitted to F1 and F2 generations. Moreover, the inheritance of high incentive response to cocaine is contingent on high motivation, as it is elicited by voluntary cocaine administration, but not high intake of cocaine itself...

OBJECTIVE: Hyponatremia due to excessive fluid intake (i.e. primary polydipsia (PP)) is common. It may culminate in profound hyponatremia-carrying considerable risk of morbidity. However, data on patients with PP leading to hyponatremia is lacking. Herein, we describe the characteristics of polydiptic patients hospitalised with profound hyponatremia, and assess one-year outcomes. DESIGN: Substudy of the prospective observational Co-MED Study. PATIENTS: Patients with an episode of profound hyponatremia (≤125mmol/l) due to PP in the medical emergency were eligible and classified into psychogenic polydipsia (PsyP), dipsogenic polydipsia (DiP), and beer potomania (BP)...

AIM: To review the literature on psychosocial interventions for addiction affected family members in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC). METHODS: A systematic review with a detailed search strategy focussing on psychosocial interventions directed towards people affected by addiction without any gender, year or language specifications was conducted. Identified titles and abstracts were screened; where needed full papers retrieved, and then independently reviewed...

The concept of addiction is loaded with connotations and is often used for its political as much as its medical utility. The scientific case for 'food addiction' as a clinical phenotype currently rests on its association with generic diagnostic criteria for substance-related disorders being applied to everyday foods and eating-related problems. This has fused the concept of obesity with addiction regardless of whether it fits the definition. The hedonic, or reward, system can account for the ingestion of foods and drugs, confirming that they share neural substrates that differentiate liking and wanting...

BACKGROUND: The automatic tendency to attend to and focus on substance-related cues in the environment (attentional bias), has been found to contribute to the persistence of addiction. Attentional bias modification (ABM) interventions might, therefore, contribute to treatment outcome and the reduction of relapse rates. Based on some promising research findings, we designed a study to test the clinical relevance of ABM as an add-on component of regular intervention for alcohol and cannabis patients...

Alcohol abuse causes major social, economic and health-related problems worldwide. Alcohol, like other drugs of abuse, increases levels of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, facilitating behavioural reinforcement and substance abuse. Previous studies suggested that glycine receptors (GlyRs) are involved in the regulation of accumbal dopamine levels. Here, we investigated the presence of GlyRs in accumbal dopamine receptor medium spiny neurons (MSNs) of C57BL/6J mice, analyzing mRNA expression-levels and immunoreactivity of GlyR subunits, as well as ethanol sensitivity...

BACKGROUND: Tobacco and alcohol use present multiplicative risk for aerodigestive cancers. Reducing alcohol consumption improves smoking cessation outcomes and reduces cancer risk. Risky alcohol consumption and smoking are often treated separately despite concurrent treatment potentially leading to better outcomes for each. However, no rapidly scalable program exists for combined interventions in primary care clinics spread across wide geographic areas. This cluster randomized trial aims to report on the effects of a novel clinical decision support system (CDSS) on intervention rates by primary care practitioners addressing risky alcohol use in a smoking cessation program...