CUD Treatment Updates

“WHEN you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t,” described Luke Davies in Candy on how addiction feels like.

It may be surprising, or even unbelievable, but the overall addiction potential for cannabis has been found less than for caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, cocaine or heroin.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), considers cannabis use disorder (CUD) as a condition requiring treatment.

As of 2012, no medication has proven effective for treating CUD. The US Food and Drug Administration approved no medication for it. Unlike opiate or alcohol dependence, it has far fewer treatment options.

The review of novel medications for CUD, the Balter, Cooper and Haney Review published in Current Addiction Reports (June 2014), noted treatments that had been confirmed ineffective... [READ MORE]

This article appears on Sun. Star Cebu newspaper on 15 July 2014.

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Deadly X-Gene Mutants

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .) This article appears in Sun-Star Ce...

Joy, Temperance and Repose

“I RECKON being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh (1903). The term “antioxidant” was originally used in the 18th century to refer to a chemical that prevents the consumption of oxygen in laboratory experiments. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, extensive study exploded... ( Read more ) This article appeared in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 02 June 2010.

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