A monthly long-acting injection of buprenorphine can be an easier and more effective therapy for people struggling with opioid addiction, but treatment centers aren’t much interested in using it, a new study discovers. Only one-third of treatment facilities (33%) offer long-acting buprenorphine injections to patients, according to findings published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers suspect this is because substance use treatment centers face administrative obstacles that make it more difficult to offer buprenorphine injections, compared to the daily pill form of the drug. “This paper highlights gaps that exist in the system,” said lead researcher Nitin Vidyasagar, a second-year student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. “We can now use the information to help treat people who need it the most.” Buprenorphine works by activating the same brain receptors that more powerful opioids target. However, the effects are weaker, helping addicts wean themselves off other substances like heroin and fentanyl. Analyzing federal data on substance use, researchers found that primary care doctors are more likely to offer long-acting buprenorphine shots than treatment centers. This might be because doctor’s offices face fewer regulatory and administrative hurdles to prescribe the medication as a monthly injection, the researchers said. “The takeaway is, we still have a lot of work to do to make the full complement of opioid treatment options…  read on >  read on >

Telehealth might be a more effective way of treating alcoholism than in-person therapy sessions, a new study reports. Alcoholics who receive treatment through telehealth were more likely to engage in more therapy visits and stick to anti-alcohol medication longer than those who venture out for alcohol use disorder therapy, researchers found. These results are “particularly important in the current context, as the United States debates whether to sustain or revoke pandemic-era policies that decreased barriers to telehealth,” concluded the research team led by Dr. Ponni Perumalswami, of the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. For the study, researchers analyzed data from the Veterans Administration gathered during the pandemic, from March 2020 to February 2021, on more than 138,000 patients diagnosed with alcohol use disorder. During the study period, 53% of patients had at least one video visit, 38% had at least one telephone visit but no video visits, and 9% had only in-person visits, researchers said. Telehealth was associated with more therapy visits and medication use compared with in-person visits, researchers found. What’s more, among those who received treatment through telehealth, video visits prompted significantly more therapy sessions than telephone visits. Black patients were less likely to receive video telehealth treatment and were more likely to have in-person visits, highlighting “important disparities in alcohol use disorder telehealth use,” researchers said. The new study was published recently…  read on >  read on >

U.S. rates of suicide by all methods rose steadily for adolescents between 1999 and 2020, a new analysis shows. During those two decades, over 47,000 Americans between the ages 10 and 19 lost their lives to suicide, the report found, and there have been sharp increases year by year. Girls and minority adolescents have charted especially steep increases in suicides, said a team led by Cameron Ormiston, of the U.S. National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. “An overall increasing trend was observed across all demographics,” the researchers wrote in a study published March 29 in the journal JAMA Network Open. The findings were based on federal death certificate data from 1999 through 2020. By race, sex and means of suicide, some troubling trends stood out. For example, while deaths from drug (or other substance) overdose rose by 2.7% per year between 1999 and 2020 among all adolescents, it rose by 4.5% per year among girls, specifically. That trend has only accelerated in recent years: Between 2011 and 2020, suicides by overdose jumped 12.6% per year among female adolescents, Ormiston’s group reported. All of this suggests that “adolescents are finding more lethal means of poisonings, contributing to an increase in deaths by suicide,” they said. And while suicides using guns rose 5.3% per year during 1999 to 2020 among boys, it increased even more…  read on >  read on >

A genetic mutation that boosts cell function could protect people against Alzheimer’s disease, even if they carry another gene mutation known to boost dementia risk. The newly discovered mutation appears to protect people who carry the APOE4 gene, which increases risk of Alzheimer’s, researchers said. The protective mutation causes cells to produce a more powerful version of humanin, a tiny protein that plays an important role in cellular function. Humanin levels are higher in people who have reached the age of 100 despite carrying the APOE4 gene, which predisposes people to early death as well as Alzheimer’s, researchers discovered. Humanin produced by this variant also effectively cleared amyloid beta from the brains of lab mice carrying APOE4, researchers report. “This new study sheds light on resilience genes that help people live longer and partially explains why some people at high risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease are spared,” said senior study author Dr. Pinchas Cohen, dean of the University of Southern California (USC) Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. The gene variant that causes higher levels of humanin is called P3S-humanin, researchers said. This variant is thought to be extremely rare, and is found primarily in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, researchers said. Mitochondria, the energy powerhouse of cells, produce humanin to protect against cellular aging and stress, according to a 2023 review in the journal Biology.…  read on >  read on >