A new study published in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment examined federal data on health and drug use among nearly 20,000 people who inject drugs and are low-income in the US, and found no association between Medicaid expansion and misuse of prescription opioids or benzodiazepines, drugs often prescribed for anxiety or insomnia. These findings present real-world data that disprove narratives claiming that Medicaid expansion has fueled the longstanding opioid crisis in America by increasing access to low-cost prescription opioids diverted for non-prescribed use. 

Researchers characterized changes in the brain as people age and discovered that neural changes in teenagers may predict how decision-making and behavioral control develop.

New research from the University of Minnesota Medical School has uncovered that anxiety and apathy — two common but distinct emotional states — lead to fundamentally different patterns in how people learn and make decisions. 

A new USC-led study provides the first nationwide picture of who knows about, carries, and uses naloxone to reverse deadly opioid overdoses. Mireille Jacobson, professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and a senior fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, said the study was conducted to address the lack of comprehensive data on access to the lifesaving medication and eventually to support work on how it affects the number of deaths attributed to opioid overdoses in the U.S.

The combination of prescribed central nervous system stimulants, such as drugs that relieve ADHD symptoms, with prescribed opioid medications is associated with a pattern of escalating opioid intake, a new study has found.

People in their late teens and early 20s may be more sensitive to nicotine and more susceptible to nicotine addiction than middle aged adults, according to a new study in mice from researchers in the Penn State Department of Biobehavioral Health. The results provide evidence that the effects of drugs on the body — both medication and misused substances — change over the lifespan in ways that clinicians and researchers need to consider when developing and prescribing treatments, the researchers said.