Young U.S. Women Are The New Face Of Heroin Use

July 23, 2015

Young U.S. Women: New Face Of Heroin Use

Heroin use in the United States (U.S) like in other parts of the world has been predominantly men. The few women found in this category have been those in the inner city, rich and spoilt. However this is fast changing. Within this past decade heroin use has hit a staggering 62%. In 2005 heroin use was reportedly slightly over 1.6% in every 1000 Americans, aged 12 and over. In 2015 however the percentage went up somewhere above 2.6% per a similar number in U.S.

The rate of heroin use doubled that of men in a similar period. According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the percentage gradually increased from a mere 0.8% back in the year 2002 to 1.6% women alone. According to the report, the face of heroin use has changed from a stern faced man in the city unexpectedly to a young beautiful woman in the suburb. The report also indicated heroin-related deaths have hit of 300 percent.

heroin-addiction

Increasing Heroin Use in Women a Result of Pain Killer Prescriptions

The report pointed out different groups in the U.S. that have never been known to use heroin have been lured into the same in more recent times. It indicates a leading group of increasingly heroin users are women, those with higher incomes and private insurance. In as much as the net of heroin use reportedly caught indiscriminately across gender and societal status, many experts agree women have become more vulnerable to the increasingly available substance. Dr Dalal Akoury of Integrative Addiction Institute notes there is more than a double increase in number of heroin-related cases of addictions among women than men lately as opposed to some years back.

The increase of heroin use among women has however been attributed to increased pain killer prescriptions for a number of related complicated medical conditions over time. Various experts argue this happened gradually over time. “I suspect it’s been a more of a gradual thing, because more women have been exposed to pain medication for various problems. They have developed first an opiate addiction then have moved on to heroin,” said Onsrud, a consultant on Addiction Services at the Mayo Clinic.

Form Heroin Task Force to Fight Increasing Use

Various authorities argue the war on heroin use has been in existence for some time, with a few successes however it has continued to increase. In La Crosse County, the officials noticed heroin use was getting out of hand and decided to face it head-on. They formed the little known La Crosse County Heroin Task Force.

“We noticed heroin use had increased as early as the year 2010-2011,” said Al Bliss, then the task force coordinator. However he noted even at that, a lot more still has to be done. “I think we’ve made some end roads at decreasing availability of heroin but it still remains a problem,” added Bliss.

The task force coordinator also said in order to curb the menacing heroin problem, communities needed to form programs more or less similar to the Heroin Task Force so as to get like-minded people working together at attaining a single determined goal. “We need to further educate the community in offering help, treatment, and preventive care; and to conduct a lot of awareness in order to address the comprehensive problem of drug abuse,” he said.

Heroin Use

Substance Addiction Increasing Heroin Use

In a separate interview, Dr. Akoury echoed Mr. Bliss’s earlier observations; she said people suffering from substance abuse are more likely to form a habit of popping in pills. She added they are more susceptible to heroin use. A number of studies and medical reports also support this claim. One commonly cited study indicates alcohol and cigarette smokers have a higher chance of about 5 times their fellows who do not. The CDC report actually indicated 96% of heroin users used at least one more addictive drug. Also, that 61% of the heroin users used at least three more addictive substances.

In conclusion Dr. Frieden, director of CDC empathized with the current state of heroin use. He said: “It is heartbreaking to see injection drug use making a comeback in the U.S.” He said solving the heroin issue boils down to preventing addiction in the first place by hunting down the primary cause, which according to him were opioid prescriptions. “It also means; increasing access to rehabilitation including medications such as methadone or suboxone, cracking down on heroin sales, and increasing use of naloxone to reverse overdose. These are the traditional basics to deal with addiction, hence also key in combatting heroin use,” quickly added the CDC director

For the latest about heroin use in the U.S and the rest of the world please sign up for this year’s August Integrative Addiction Medicine Conference. http://www.integrativeaddiction2015.com is the link to catch with speakers lined up for the event among other possible attendants participants

White Young U.S. Women, New Face Of Heroin Use

Antibiotics in Foods is a Health Risk

May 2, 2015

Are The Antibiotics In Your Food And Your Meet Destroying Your Health?

Antibiotics The common adage that whatever you eat affects your health comes in handy here. we are supposed to be eating foods that help in building our bodies and laying a fortress that is not easily passed through by diseases, however with everybody having eyes fixed on the financial gains he can reap from the foods he grows it has become rather common to find that our foods are grown with enhancers that are at the end of the end of the day very dangerous to anybody eating them.

It is estimated that 99 percent of farmed animals in the US raised for food are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In fact, 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the US are used in agriculture. This enough to show you that the meet eaten in the US is highly concentrated in these antibiotics that eventually may turn out to be more dangerous than beneficial to us.

CAFOs are costly to your health

These foods may be easily available and priced affordable but when you take them after some time you will realize that the price at which these foods like pork, beef, egg, dairy and poultry are sold in the supermarket isn’t a true reflection of what they cost you. Most of these animals are raised like inanimate objects; they do not have even space to move, they do not see the sunlight, they do not get a gasp of fresh air and they have no clean place to sleep. theirs is to eat and eat until they are mature to be sold, eating boosters that they may mature faster, but after they are eaten for a long time is when the problems may set in.

The CAFOs are not very beneficial to you. if there is anybody who benefits from the CAFOs then only the farmers of these animals and the few involved in the industry are but the consumers stand at a loss and its quite unfortunate that while CAFOs have mastered the art of growing profits, they’ve overlooked the basic natural laws that govern growing animals and this culminates in huge health risks on those consuming these foods.

When antibiotics are used in an uncontrolled manner as has been used in the US agricultural sector they lead to an antibiotic-resistant disease. Approximately 25 million pounds of antibiotics are administered to livestock in the US every year for purposes other than treating disease, such as making the animals grow bigger faster. this are ways to maximize profits often hidden within these line ‘boosting food security ‘but the bitter reality is that those antibiotics, and even worse, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, are transferred to you via meat and even through the animal manure that is used as crop fertilizer.

According to Dr. Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there is even bigger problem than antibiotics simply being left behind in your meat as it’s a practice that is promoting the spread of antibiotic-resistant disease.

“The more you use an antibiotic, the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, we put into livestock, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant.” Dr. Arjun advises.

The genes that make the bacteria resistant is often shared by other bacteria, therefore the drug resistant bacteria that contaminate your meat may share these genes with other bacteria in your body making you more susceptible to sickness. Drug-resistant bacteria also accumulate in manure that is used in the fields to grow crops and enters waterways, allowing the drug-resistant bacteria to spread far and wide and ultimately back up the food chain to us. Therefore we are exposed to this risk and it is now more than just eating the beef, the pork or the poultry.

CDC links antibiotic-resistance illnesses to food

Antibiotics In America alone antibiotic-resistant bacteria infect 2 million people every year. these infections leads to death of 23,000 Americans every year but this is nothing in comparison to the estimation of the UK prime minister David Cameron that by 2050 antibiotic resistance will have killed 300 million people, with the annual global death toll reaching 10 million. This is really a big reason to worry.

CDC has also linked antibiotic-resistant illness to food. The CDC reports that 22 percent of those illnesses are caused by food especially the foods that are sourced from CAFOs.

The composition of your microbiome is somewhat like a fingerprint. It’s unique to you but, unlike your fingerprints, highly impressionable and constantly changing. As reported by Scientific American: “The ecology of the gut microbiome may trigger or contribute to a variety of diseases, including autoimmune disorders and obesity, research suggests. Factors such as early environment, diet, and antibiotic exposure have a lot to do with why people differ from one another in the composition of their microbiomes.”

Generally when your gut flora is unhealthy, then you will be predisposed to many health problems therefore eating these foods that may culminate into antibiotic- resistance illnesses are a big leap into a haven of illnesses that eventually causes many deaths. The CAFOs generally are harmful to your gut health and so are other foods that are genetically engineered to enhance growth and pump in more profits.

There is much more to the foods we eat than just getting full and equipping your body with the needed nutrients. The foods may also cause you diseases. These foods related illnesses need to be treated effectively through integrative medicine. Dr. Dalal Akoury (MD) is an expert at this. Call her on (843) 213-1480 for help.

Are The Antibiotics In Your Food And Your Meet Destroying Your Health?

Prefrontal Cortex and Addiction

January 6, 2015

The Prefrontal Cortex Plays Crucial Role in Addiction

The prefrontal cortex enables us to make rational, sound decisions. It also helps us to override impulsive urges that may trigger reactions that are not in the best of our interests. If acted upon, these impulses urges can cause us to act without thinking. It is the prefrontal cortex that helps you to even maintain sound relationships around you. Each and every day you may be confronted by this impulsive urge but it is the prefrontal cortex that helps us think rationally and help override the impulsive urges. Obviously, this ability to inhibit impulses is very helpful. It enables us to function well in society. It protects us from harm by allowing us to consider the consequences of our actions. However, when the pre-frontal cortex is not functioning correctly, the opposite occurs. Addiction causes changes to the prefrontal cortex. These changes account for two characteristics of addiction: impulsivity and compulsivity.

In the past years, the loss of control over drug intake that occurs in addiction was initially believed to result from disruption of subcortical reward circuits. However, current studies in addictive behaviors have identified a key involvement of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) both through its regulation of limbic reward regions and its involvement in higher-order executive function such as self-control, salience attribution and awareness.in this article we will try to revisit studies that have been done in the past so as to reach an understanding on how the prefrontal cortex is involved in drug addiction. Most studies have suggested that disruption of the PFC in addiction underlies not only compulsive drug taking but also accounts for the damaging behaviors that are associated with addiction and the loss of free will.

In a study where rats were used, it was found that stimulating a specific part of the brain reduces compulsive cocaine seeking. The finding proposes a potential approach to changing addictive behavior. This study and other studies that have been done show that the prefrontal cortex that is involved in decision-making and inhibitory response control is compromised in addiction. Deficits in the prefrontal cortex are involved in drug addiction The Deep-layer pyramidal pre-limbic cortex neurons; is a layer of cells that reach into areas of the brain that have been implicated in drug-seeking behaviors. Activating the Deep-layer pyramidal pre-limbic cortex neurons might reduce the rats’ cocaine seeking.

Medical experts and researchers agree that compulsive drug taking, which brings a myriad of health and social consequences, is one of the most challenging aspects of human drug addiction. In 2011, an estimated 1.4 million Americans age 12 and older were past-month cocaine users. No medications have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating cocaine addiction. Obviously, cocaine addiction doesn’t affect America alone but the whole world.

Animal model studies

Drs. Billy Chen and Antonello Bonci at NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) have been using an animal model of cocaine addiction in a bid to gain insights into the neurobiology of compulsive drug use, trained rats learned to push levers to receive cocaine. When the cocaine doses were later followed by a mild electric shock to the foot, most rats stopped pushing the levers. Some rats, however, exhibited compulsive cocaine seeking by continuing to push the levers in spite of the foot shocks.

In this research, the researchers compared nerve cell firing patterns in the brains of the shock-sensitive and shock-resistant groups of rats. They studied a region of the prefrontal cortex that, in humans, is involved in decision making and inhibitory response control, which are both compromised in addiction. Their analysis focused on deep-layer pyramidal prelimbic cortex neurons because these cells reach into areas of the brain that have been implicated in drug-seeking behaviors. The study appeared online in Nature on April 3, 2013. The scientists found that almost twice as much current was needed to activate these neurons in compulsive cocaine-seeking rats than in the shock-sensitive rats or rats that hadn’t been exposed to cocaine. If these neurons are behind the rats’ compulsive behavior, the team reasoned, and then activating them might reduce the rats’ cocaine seeking behavior.

Prefrontal cortex For this study the scientists employed a light-based genetic, or optogenetic, technique to activate or inhibit pyramidal neurons in the prelimbic cortex at will. They injected harmless viruses engineered to deliver genes for producing proteins that, once embedded in the neuron’s surface this could induce or inhibit the cells’ activity in response to light of specific wavelengths. Tiny optic fibers were implanted in the rats’ brains to deliver light pulses to the cells. As predicted, activating these brain cells reduced cocaine seeking in the compulsive, shock-resistant rats. Inhibiting the cells in shock-sensitive rats increased cocaine seeking during foot-shock sessions.

“This exciting study offers a new direction of research for the treatment of cocaine and possibly other addictions,” says NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. “We already knew, mainly from human brain emerging studies, that deficits in the prefrontal cortex are involved in drug addiction. Now that we have learned how fundamental these deficits are, we feel more confident than ever about the therapeutic promise of targeting that part of the brain.”, he concluded.

“By targeting a specific portion of the prefrontal cortex, our hope is to reduce compulsive cocaine seeking and craving in patients.” Bonci said as he reiterated that his group is now planning clinical trials to test noninvasive methods for stimulating this brain region in people. Dr. Dalal Akoury of AWAREmed Health and Wellness Center has dedicated her life to helping addicts restore their lives by use of integrative medicine. Call her on (843) 213-1480 for help.

The Prefrontal Cortex Plays Crucial Role in Addiction

GMO foods and Your Health. What is a GMO foods?

October 19, 2013

Dr. Dalal Akoury

Your Health and GMO foods. What is a GMO foods?

Here at AWAREmed Health and Wellness Resource Center, we believe that people should be as healthy as they can possibly be! But sometimes we don’t know the right foods to eat, and which to avoid. Thats why we’re here to help you understand what GMOs are and why they should be avoided. Please feel free to email us if you have any other questions. Dr. Dalal Akoury

A GMO is the DNA of an organism that has been altered in an unnatural way. It is also known as “modern biotechnology” or “gene technology”. These organisms are used to create a genetically modified plant, which is then used to grow food crops.

This is a controversial topic and it has many views on its advantages and disadvantages:

Your Health and GMO foods. What is a GMO foods?

Advantages:

– It has been tested many times, there are numerous studies that have traced the effects of GMOs foods on animals. Most of these studies have shown that GMO Foods are safe and not harmful to consume.

– It is easier for farming. GMO Foods allow plants/crops to be altered to grow in environments that usually would not be sustainable for normal plants to grow.

– It can be grown in larger quantities, so this makes the price of food lower. If the farming doesn’t take that much work then that means there is more of it. This will lead to food that isn’t as expensive, which will make food more attainable and accessible for people of all income statuses.

Disadvantages:

– It can affect human health. Most of the studies that have been performed are on animals, rather than humans. The danger is that we do not know the long term affects that it has on humans, since it has never been measured before. Many scientists are not sure if these GMO Foods will cause: exposure to allergens, antibiotic resistance, endocrine disruption, reproductive disorders and accelerated aging.

– The FDA treats GMO Foods the same way that they treat regularly grown crops or plants. There is not much testing required for these crops or plants to sell. They also do not have to be educationally or nutritionally labeled, which affects the consumer because they are not completely sure what they are eating and how it will affect their body.

– There is a controversial problem on ethics. The issue is that many people feel is unethical. They think it is against the law of nature and not in the normal cycle of life to do this. Some religions are also strongly against GMO Foods for this reason; they think it is against God’s doings.

– Most countries do not think GMOs are safe. There are almost 50 countries that have major restrictions or have banned, producing and selling GMOs. The United States is one of the countries that still approve GMO Foods.

– They can affect our environment! Almost all of the GMOs that are harvested are resistant to herbicides. The use of toxic herbicides has increased 15 times since GMO Foods were introduced. These plants and crops have also produced what people now call, “super weeds” and “super bugs”. These have to be killed with even more toxic poisons than normal.

Dr. Dalal Akoury and the team of AWAREmed Health and Wellness Resource Center explain: Some people want to completely avoid GMO Foods, what is the best way to do it?

Buying organic food! There are absolutely no GMOs involved when buying organic food. There is an actual certification saying that they are not manipulated in any form.

AWAREmed Health and Wellness Resource Center team and Dr. Dalal Akoury describe: The main foods that are most likely to contain

Corn: is known as a highly modified food. Almost half of the corn grown in the United States is genetically modified. Some researchers believe that this corn can lead to several health problems, including weight gain and organ failure.

Soy: It is estimated that 89% of soy is genetically modified. This crop can be found in tofu, different vegetarian products, and soybean oil. It is also modified to resist herbicides.

Sugar Beets: Some studies have shown that the United States carries genetically-modified sugar beets. They also have resistance to herbicides.

Aspartame: is found in diet soda, chewing gum, yogurts, cereals and many artificial sweeteners. It is found that aspartame is made with genetically modified bacteria.

Papayas: Most of the genetically modified papayas are from Hawaii, and the United States and Canada consume most it.

Canola: is also one of the main modified foods that is consumed in the United States. Canola oil is found through a series of modifying chemical actions.

Cotton: It is estimated that 83% of cotton contains GMOs. And has been to led to believe that it has serious health risks.

Dairy Products: Most dairy products contain growth hormones because many cows are injected with hormones. Organic milk is the best way to go if you want to drink it.

Zucchini and Yellow Squash: Small amounts of these vegetables are led to believe that they are modified to resist viruses.

What are some other foods that contain GMO’s? Explains Dr. Dalal Akoury

Your Health and GMO. What is a GMO?

Veggie sausages
Tortilla chips
Most processed foods
High fructose corn syrup
Meatballs and burgers
Alfalfa
Cornbread mix and corn meal
Any type of protein drinks or powders that are soy-based
Cotton-seed oil

How do I avoid GMO’s completely?

Dr. Dalal Akoury discusses the best solutions for health and Wellness? Select organic foods or start gardening for yourself! You can also try to modify your diet. For example, instead of using canola, soy or corn oil, you can switch them to use olive oil or safflower oil since these are less likely to contain genetic modifications. You should also try to cook healthy foods at home rather than going out to eat and having processed foods that are high in trans-fat.