Buprenorphine and Opiate Rehab
In order to understand why buprenorphine is an integral part of opiate addiction rehab, it's important to understand what it is. Simply put, buprenorphine is one of the components of another drug called suboxone. It's what pharmaceutical companies refer to as an "opioid agonist," which means it actually produces mild versions of the effects generally associated with full opioid drugs like vicodin and heroin.
When used as part of suboxone, buprenorphine's partial opioid effects essentially block withdrawal symptoms, though patients must then be weaned from suboxone. The need for a weaning process is just one of the reasons that researchers are looking into the use of buprenorphine via a time-released implant that is placed under the skin.
The thought is that an implant will be better at helping patients not relapse, since medications in pill and film form can lead to setback-causing issues like drug diversion (a new drug dependency forming in place of the old), or missed doses, which can then lead to withdrawal symptoms. The use of an implant would eliminate these problems, and provide low doses of buprenorphine at a steady pace over a prescribed length of time.
How effective is the buprenorphine implant? In a study done by Dr. Walter Ling and his colleagues at UCLA, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last October, 163 adults going through treatment for opioid dependency were randomized with 108 of them receiving a buprenorphine implant and the other 55 receiving a placebo. Both groups were given a surgical procedure to implant an array of four devices meant to administer drugs. The placebo group received no drugs, and the others received 80 milligrams of buprenorphine per device over six months.
During the study, all participants were tested for illicit drug use, and after sixteen weeks it was determined that the patients receiving buprenorphine were much less likely to test positive. Specifically, 40% of those with the active implants tested negative, as compared with only 28.3% of the group with placebos.
What does this mean for the future of buprenorphine use in opiate rehab? It's still at the frontline for oral treatment options but with new alternative treatment options it's likely that the face of addiction treatment could be changed for the better.
