Addiction: Drug Therapies For Addiction Flashcards
What are drug therapies?
They involve prescription for medications. These are two main types of drug therapies: agonist and antagonist.
What are Agonist therapies?
Involve the prescription of medications that bind with and activate receptors in the brain that are involved in. These original addiction. This type of drug therapy reduces withdrawal symptoms associated with the addiction, making it easier for addicts to abstain.
- Varenicline is a medication used to treat nicotine addiction.
- This is a partial agonist for nicotine receptors, meaning it binds with and partially activates nicotine receptors in the brain. This releases some dopamine into the brains reward pathway, thereby reducing withdrawal symptoms.
- It also reduces the pleasure of smoking by competing with nicotine for nicotine receptors. This competition makes it less likely for nicotine to bind fully and activate these receptors, making smoking less enjoyable for those taking varenicline.
What are Antagonist Therapies?
- Involve the prescription of medications that bind with but do not activate receptors. Such therapies are used to prevent behaviours from producing their pleasurable effects.
- An example in Naltrexone. This is a prescription medication used to treat addiction to opioid drugs, such as heroine.
- Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist that blocks opioid receptors in the brain without activating them. By occupying these receptors, it prevents opioids, such as heroin, from binding to them. As a result, dopamine is not released into the brain’s reward pathway, which stops opioids from producing their pleasurable effects.
- Naltrexone has also been used to treat gambling addiction. By blocking opioid receptors, naltrexone also reduces the release of dopamine into the reward pathway. This means gamblers may experience less reward from gambling.
What research support is there for the effectiveness of drug therapies for addiction?
A 2013 meta-analysis conducted by the Cochrane charity concluded that varenicline is the most effective medication for tobacco cessation and that smokers were nearly three times more likely to quit on varenicline than with placebo* treatment. These findings provide clear support for the effectiveness of varenicline, an agonist drug therapy, as a treatment for nicotine addiction. The comparison with a placebo control group is especially compelling as it demonstrates that varenicline itself is effective, rather than just being effective because the patients believed it would help them. Therefore, this shows that drug therapies, like varenicline, have a real – rather than just psychological - effect for treating nicotine addiction. Moreover, this study’s use a of meta-analysis strengthens its conclusions on the ability of drug therapies to treat addiction. This is because meta-analyses combine the results of multiple studies, meaning they have large representative samples. This means this study’s findings on the effectiveness of varenicline can be generalised to the target population of nicotine addicts.
What is a limitation with drug therapy treatments?
Drug therapies only really address two issues in addiction: the withdrawal symptoms experienced when addicts stop engaging in their addiction, and the reward that addicts get from
engaging in their addiction. However, this method of treatment is arguably limited as it only focuses on addressing issues arising from only one level of explanation: the neurochemical. This is limited as according to the
biopsychosocial model of addiction, there is no single pathway to addiction, as addiction develops from the interaction of multiple levels of explanation, including neurochemical, cognitive and social factors. Drug therapies fail to address these other factors, like the social and economic circumstances that led a person to become a nicotine addict, and as a result they offer a limited method for treating addiction. Arguably it would be better to treat addiction in a holistic way, addressing all the factors that led a person to become an addict. Drug therapies could be an important part of this holistic treatment, but they would still only be one part.
Why are there important economic implications for drug therapies for addiction?~
Addiction is an economic burden on society. Every year drugs alone cost the UK £10.7 billion in policing, healthcare, welfare and crime, with drug-related theft alone costing £6 billion a year. There are also costs relating to the economic inactivity and poor productivity of those experiencing addiction. By helping people recover from their addictions, research into the development of effective drug
therapies to treat addiction could save society a substantial amount of money. Such savings could then be directed towards programmes to help prevent people developing addictions in the first place, which would have further economic benefits. Drug therapies may be an especially wise economic investment as once developed they provide the potential for a relatively cheap way of treating addiction.
