![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
Abstract
Introduction: Cognitive impairment has been reported in drug-dependent patients under opioid maintenance treatment. Objectives: To compare cognitive functioning in healthy controls and in opioid-dependent patients treated with Buprenorphine, Heroin, or methadone maintenance. Methods: We used the standardized test battery ART-90 to study cognitive function in patients under long-term heroin treatment (n = 20), Bup (n = 22), or Met (n = 24) maintenance treatment and healthy controls (n = 25). Results: Patients receiving heroin performed significantly worse than healthy controls in most domains. Heroin patients performed worse than patients in the other two treatment groups in subtests measuring psychomotor performance under stress conditions and monotony. Conclusions and Scientific Significance: Although a number of limitations must be taken into account, this study provides some preliminary evidence that cognitive function may be more impaired in patients under heroin maintenance treatment than in patients receiving Bup or Met and in healthy controls.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The study was performed as part of C. Limmer’s doctoral thesis. This article was prepared in the context of the project F9 “Optimizing substitution treatment outcome by allocating substitution substances and psychosocial treatment components to patient profiles (short title: OSTD)” of the Addiction Research Network ASAT (Allocating Substance Abuse Treatments to Patient Heterogeneity); E-mail: [email protected]; homepage: www.asat-verbund.de. ASAT is sponsored by a federal grant of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (01 EB 0440–0441, 01 EB 0142). The heroin study was also supported by a grant from the City of Munich. We thank Jacquie Klesing, ELS, for her editing assistance with this article.
Declaration of Interest
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article. Dr Soyka has received travel grants or has worked as a consultant for Eli lilly, Bristol-myers Aquibb and Astra Zeneca, Sanofi-Aventis, Essex, Reckitt Benckiser, Phoenux, Prempharm.