Drug addiction has been associated with an increased risk for cancer, psychological complications, heart, liver, and lung disease, as well as infection. While genes have been identified that can mark individuals at risk for substance abuse, the initiation step of addiction is attributed to persistent metabolic disruptions occurring following the first instance of narcotic drug use. Advances in analytical technologies can enable the detection of thousands of signals in body fluids and excreta that can be used to define biochemical profiles of addiction. Today, these approaches hold promise for determining how exposure to drugs, in the absence or presence of other environmentally relevant factors, can impact human metabolism. We posit that these can lead to candidate biomarkers of drug dependence, treatment, withdrawal, or relapse.

吸毒与癌症，心理并发症，心脏，肝脏和肺部疾病以及感染的风险增加有关。虽然已经鉴定出可以标记有滥用药物风险的个体的基因，但成瘾的起始步骤归因于在首次使用麻醉药品后发生的持续性代谢破坏。分析技术的进步可以检测出体液和排泄物中成千上万种信号，这些信号可以用来定义成瘾的生化特征。如今，这些方法有望确定在没有其他环境相关因素的情况下接触药物如何影响人类的新陈代谢。我们认为，这些可能导致药物依赖性，治疗，停药或复发的候选生物标志物。