Addiction is a growing public health crisis for the United States, and current treatment
modalities remain inadequate. From 2001 to 2014, there was nearly a 3-fold increase
in deaths from drug overdose, including a 6-fold increase from heroin alone [
]. Traditional pharmacologic and behavioral therapies fail to achieve abstinence for
the majority of patients with addiction, necessitating a more efficacious treatment
modality [
[2]
]. Recently, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has emerged as a very promising option for
addiction given its safety, reversibility, and titratability. It has been reported
that stimulation of areas such as the nucleus accumbens can disrupt addictive behavior
[
3
,
4
]. Moreover, our recent study found if DBS induces abstinence in 49% of heroin addicted
subjects, it would be more cost-effective than methadone maintenance treatment, the
current standard of care [
[5]
].To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
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References
- Overdose Death Rates.2015
- New pharmacological treatment strategies for relapse prevention.Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2013; 13: 583-609
- Amelioration of binge eating by nucleus accumbens shell deep brain stimulation in mice involves D2 receptor modulation.J Neurosci. 2013; 33: 7122-7129
- Addiction therapy. Refining deep brain stimulation to emulate optogenetic treatment of synaptic pathology.Science. 2015; 347: 659-664
- Deep brain stimulation compared with methadone maintenance for the treatment of heroin dependence: a threshold and cost-effectiveness analysis.Addiction. 2012; 107: 624-634
- Deep brain stimulation of the nucleus accumbens and its usefulness in severe opioid addiction.Mol Psychiatry. 2014; 19: 145-146
- Is deep brain stimulation a treatment option for addiction?.Addiction. 2015; 110: 547-548
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 15, 2016
Received:
February 5,
2016
Footnotes
Portions of this work were presented in poster format at the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery by Dr. Difrancesco, 2012.
Identification
Copyright
© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
