Conclusions Our analysis of the relative safety of buprenorphine and methadone for opioid substitution treatment reveals that buprenorphine is six times safer than methadone with regard to overdose risk among the general population. Clinicians should be aware of the increased risk of prescribing methadone, and tighter regulations are needed to prevent its diversion. (Source: BMJ […]

The product license of buprenorphine/naloxone for opioid substitution therapy indicates reducing methadone concentrations to 30 mg or less per day for a minimum of 1 week before transferring patients to buprenorphine and no sooner than 24 hours after the last methadone dose, because of the risk of precipitated withdrawal and a corresponding high risk of […]

Conclusions: A high level of willingness to take XR-NTX was observed in this setting. Interestingly, daily injection heroin use was positively associated with willingness, whereas Caucasian participants were less willing to take XR-NTX. Although explanations for unwillingness were described in this study, further research is needed to investigate real-world acceptability of XR-NTX as an additional […]

The high prevalence of interrelated problems with opioid use disorder, injection drug use (IDU), and HIV/AIDS in Malaysia has led to the scale-up of public health approaches, including opioid agonist maintenance treatment with buprenorphine or methadone. Malaysia has more than 300,000 registered people who use drugs (PWUD)-approximately 1.1% of its population of about 30 million-and […]