This is the second volume of our Emerging Treatment Approaches for Substance Use Disorders Research Topic. Please see the first volume here.

Please see the first volume here.

Substance use disorders (SUDs) represent a significant clinical, social, and economic problem. According to recent reports, approximately 2.2% of the world population meets the criteria for SUDs. Treatment strategies for patients with addiction remain limited and relatively inefficient, resulting in poor long-term outcomes. SUDs are accompanied by a higher incidence of psychiatric and somatic comorbidities. In the United States alone, the annual cost of treatment for SUDs and associated conditions has surpassed $500 billion.

Several established pharmacological interventions exist for patients with SUDs. For example, naltrexone and acamprosate are routinely prescribed for alcohol use disorder (AUD), but relapse rates remain high. For patients addicted to stimulants (most commonly cocaine), treatment is mainly supportive, and no therapeutics have demonstrated clear clinical benefits. This scarcity of pharmacological options likely reflects a lack of insight into the etiology and pathogenesis of SUDs. As discussed in one of our previous collections (Genome-wide Molecular Mechanisms of Substance Use Disorders), SUDs cause transcriptomic and proteomic changes on a global scale, with the complexity of affected molecular networks yet to be fully understood. Nonetheless, a few relatively new pharmacological approaches for SUDs are beginning to emerge, even though they are not always mechanistic.

This Research Topic aims to discuss emerging treatment options for SUDs. For example, recent developments have shown that a specific subpopulation of patients with AUD may benefit from the administration of valproic acid, a mood stabilizer typically used for the treatment of bipolar disorder. Limited evidence also supports the use of medications such as nalmefene, psilocybin, and topiramate as anti-AUD therapeutics. For patients with cocaine use disorder, modest clinical efficacy has been demonstrated for topiramate and modafinil.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Mechanistic studies on the efficacy of therapeutics targeting specific etiopathogenetic links.
- Insights into novel pharmacological approaches with clinical utility in the treatment of SUDs, either as monotherapy or adjunctive therapy.
- Animal models and/or in vitro experiments.
- Implementation of bioinformatics techniques and computational biology.
- Findings from human subjects to strengthen translational potential.

Are you interested in contributing a manuscript to this Research Topic?

Emerging Treatment Approaches for Substance Use Disorders, vol II