U Busto's research while affiliated with Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and other places

... Busto et al. report that benzodiazepine withdrawal symptoms 'disappeared over a four-week period'. 12 Patients were randomized to placebo or diazepam, meaning one group quit benzodiazepines abruptly while the other was tapered over 6 weeks. Patients were followed over the course of a year. ...

... Psychotropic drugs comprise one of the most commonly prescribed categories of drugs in industrialised countries. Over the past twenty years, the widespread use of these types of drugs and specifically the potential for abuse and dependency of benzodiazepines have become an area of concern for scholars in a variety of fields (Cappell et al 1986). In assessing the issue of psychotropics on an international scale, medical experts have suggested that if the character of psychotropic drug use is to be understood and indeed effective health and social policies are to be developed, the abuse potential and dependency liability of these drugs be thoroughly investigated (Idanpaa-Heikkila et al 1987, Medawar 1992. ...

... Because 88% of benzodiazepine users report the additional consumption of alcohol and 28% indicate intentional combined use (Ilomäki et al., 2013), it is important to clarify the potential impact of their combination for road safety. Past reviews in this area have taken a broader approach to investigating the pharmacodynamic interaction between alcohol and benzodiazepines (Moody, 2012;Sellers & Busto, 1982). Thus, rather than reiterate these conclusions, this review aims to provide an updated and concise synthesis of the available experimental research that has examined the effect of the combination of alcohol and benzodiazepines on neurocognitive domains implicated in driving performance. ...

... ADEs cause-effect relationship was evaluated using the Naranjo's algorithm. 11 Briefly, this questionnaire is one of the more commonly used algorithms for determining the likelihood of whether an adverse drug reaction is actually due to the drug rather than the result of other factors. Probability is assigned via a score termed definite, probable, possible or doubtful, avoiding data omissions or inaccuracy among evaluators. ...

... and projection regions express several nAChR subtypes on dopaminergic, GABAergic, and glutamatergic neurons 63,64 . Ultimately, administration of nicotine increases dopamine levels through increased dopaminergic neuron firing in striatal and extrastriatal areas (such as the ventral pallidum) 65 (fig. 6). ...

... The potent dopamine D 2 /D 3 receptor agonist (+)-PHNO ((+)-4-propyl-3,4,4a,5,6,10bhexahydro-2H-naphtho[1,2-b][1,4]oxazin-9-ol, molecular weight 247.33 g/mol) can cause nausea, vomiting and orthostatic hypotension, at doses of 0.25 mg three times a day (Weiner et al. 1989). In initial clinical studies using the radiotracer (+)-[ 11 C]PHNO, participants commonly experienced nausea (Willeit et al. 2006(Willeit et al. , 2008Chiuccariello et al. 2013). Houle and co-workers subsequently recommended a dose below 0.029 µg/kg for (+)-[ 11 C]PHNO, and therefore a maximum administered dose of 2.03 µg for a 70 kg participant, which is even lower than for [ 11 C]carfentanil (Blecha et al. 2017). ...

... In addition to these online assessments, we evaluated memory performance offline, at baseline and at 1 month after intervention. We also determined general cognitive function, quantified using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) 30 , and depression symptoms, assessed using the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) 31 , at baseline. Experiment 2 served as a control to test the frequency specificity of the effects in Experiment 1. ...

... Consequently, people with cirrhosis are at greater risk of experiencing adverse drug reactions compared to those with non-cirrhotic liver disease. 39 This is especially the case for patients with complications like ascites, hepatic encephalopathy, jaundice and variceal bleeding who are at higher risk of pharmacodynamic interactions. ...

... A growing body of neuroimaging research has been examining the neural correlates of cigarette smoking as well as externalizing and internalizing behaviors. The insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), two key nodes of the salience network, have been implicated in cigarette smoking and craving [19][20][21] . Positively correlated with individual variation in nicotine addiction severity, insula and ACC responses to smoking vs. neutral cues distinguished smokers who relapsed from those who maintained abstinence [22] . ...

... Among them, 17 studies plus the NARECHEM-ST case-control study (Doganis et al., unpublished data) provided information on the study variables as shown in Table 3. Among these, information for maternal vitamins, iron and/or folic acid supplementation, alcohol consumption or smoking during pregnancy was available in six [18,19,[32][33][34][35], four [36][37][38][39] and 13 [14,34,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] studies, respectively. Of the remaining studies, regarding the individual risk factor meta-analysis for alcohol, five eligible studies were excluded because: in four the requested estimates were not provided by the authors [12,14,47,48] and in one there was partial overlapping [49]. ...