Polysubstance dependence

A person with polysubstance dependence is psychologically addicted to being in an intoxicated state without a preference for one particular substance. Although any combination of three drugs can be used, studies have shown that alcohol is commonly used with another substance. This is supported by one study on polysubstance use that separated participants who used multiple substances into groups based on their preferred drug. The three substances were cocaine, alcohol, and heroin, which implies that those three are very popular. Other studies have found that opiates, cannabis, amphetamines, hallucinogens, inhalants and benzodiazepines are often used in combination as well. The results of a long-term or longitudinal study on substance use led the researchers to observe that excessively using or relying on one drug increased the probability of excessively using or relying on another drug. A person with polysubstance dependence is psychologically addicted to being in an intoxicated state without a preference for one particular substance. Although any combination of three drugs can be used, studies have shown that alcohol is commonly used with another substance. This is supported by one study on polysubstance use that separated participants who used multiple substances into groups based on their preferred drug. The three substances were cocaine, alcohol, and heroin, which implies that those three are very popular. Other studies have found that opiates, cannabis, amphetamines, hallucinogens, inhalants and benzodiazepines are often used in combination as well. The results of a long-term or longitudinal study on substance use led the researchers to observe that excessively using or relying on one drug increased the probability of excessively using or relying on another drug. Cognition refers to what happens in the mind, such as mental functions like 'perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making.' Although many studies have looked at cognitive impairments of individuals who are dependent on one drug, there are few researchers who have tried to determine the problems with cognitive functioning that are caused by dependence on multiple substances. Therefore, what is known about the effects of polysubstance dependence on mental abilities is based on the results of a few studies. The effect of polysubstance dependence on learning ability is one area of interest to researchers. A study involving 63 polysubstance dependent women and 46 controls (participants who were not using drugs) used the Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT) and the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) to look at visual memory and verbal ability. This study showed that in polysubstance dependent women, verbal learning ability was significantly decreased, though visual memory was not affected. In addition, alcohol and cocaine use led to more severe issues with verbal learning, recall, and recognition. Sometimes studies about specific groups in the general population can be informative. One study decided to test the cognitive abilities of participants in rave parties who used multiple substances. To do this, they compared 25 rave party attenders with 27 control participants who were not using drugs. The results of this study indicated that in general, the rave attender group did not perform as well on tasks that tested speed of information processing, working memory, knowledge of similarities between words, ability to attend to a task with interference in the background, and decision making. Certain drugs were associated with particular mental functions, but the researchers suggested that the impairments for working memory and reasoning were caused by the misuse of multiple substances. Another study that tried to find differences between the effects of particular drugs focused on polysubstance users who were seeking treatment for addictions to cannabis, cocaine, and heroin. They studied a group of polysubstance users and a group that was not dependent on any drugs. Because alcohol was a common co-substance for nearly all of the polysubstance user group, it was difficult to tell exactly which drugs were affecting certain cognitive functions. The researchers found that the difference in the two groups' performance levels on executive function, or higher-level cognitive processing tasks were consistently showing that the polysubstance group scored lower than the control group. In general, this meant that multiple substances negatively affected the polysubstance group's cognitive functioning. More specifically, the researchers found that the amount of cannabis and cocaine affected the verbal part of working memory, the reasoning task, and decision making, while cocaine and heroin had a similar negative effect on visual and spatial tasks, but cannabis particularly affected visual and spatial working memory. These results suggest that the combined use of cannabis, cocaine, and heroin impair more cognitive functions more severely than if used separately. Alcohol's negative effects on learning, spatial abilities and memory has been shown in many studies. This raises a question: does using alcohol in combination with other substances impair cognitive functioning even more? One study decided to try to determine if polysubstance users who also abused alcohol would display poorer performance on a verbal learning and memory test in comparison to those who abused alcohol specifically. The California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) was used due to its ability to 'quantify small changes in verbal learning and memory' by evaluating errors made during the test and the strategies used to make those errors. The results of this study showed that the group of polysubstance and alcohol abusers did perform poorly on the CVLT recall and recognition tests in comparison to the group of alcohol abusers only, which implies that alcohol and drug abuse combined impaired the memory and learning of the group of polysubstance and alcohol abusers in a different way than the effects of alcohol alone can explain. Does abstinence for long periods of time help polysubstance dependent individuals to recover cognitive functioning? To examine this question, a group of researchers tested 207 polysubstance dependent men, of whom 73.4% were dependent on three or more drugs. The researchers were interested in 6 areas of cognitive functioning, which included visual memory, verbal memory, knowledge of words, abstract reasoning, inhibition (interference), and attention. The study used the Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT) for testing visual memory, the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) for verbal memory, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale vocabulary portion for knowledge of words, the Booklet Category Test for abstract reasoning, the Stroop Neuropsychological Screening task for inhibition, and the Trail Making Test for attention. The results showed that neuropsychological ability did not improve with increases in the length of time abstinent. This suggests that polysubstance dependence leads to serious impairment which cannot be recovered much over the span of a year. There is data to support that some genes contribute to substance dependence. Some studies have focused on finding genes that predispose the person to be dependent on marijuana, cocaine, or heroin by studying genes that control a person's dopamine and opioid receptors, but no conclusive findings were reported. Other researchers found a connection between dopamine receptor genes and dependency on a substance. A potential problem with this study was that alcohol is commonly used with another substance, so the results of the study may not have been caused by dependency on a single substance. This means that multiple substances may have been contributing to the results, but the researchers suggested that further research should be done. However, there are studies that have found evidence of the influence of genes on vulnerability to substance dependence. These studies often use genotype, or the genetic information found on a person's chromosomes, and phenotype, which consists of the visible features of a person, to look at genetic patterns. One study examined the phenotype and genotype of 1,858 participants from 893 families to look at differences in three nicotinic acetylcholine receptor genes found within these individuals. The experimenters found significant connections between receptor genes for nicotine and polysubstance dependence, which indicated that differences in these genes can create the risk of being dependent on multiple substances.