Abstract
Diseases related to drug addiction are among the acute and chronic diseases that the doctor often encounters, but at the same time they are among the most difficult to recognize, due to the patient's purposefully modified history. Most medical faculties deal with the issue of addiction only marginally in the teaching of psychiatry.
Addictive substance (AS) abuse causes tolerance and mental or physical dependence and causes adaptive changes in the body. In recreational use, signs of damage to health may not appear, in chronic use they appear, but they are often not associated with the abuse of AS by a doctor, or they manifest only when AS is withdrawn, when withdrawal symptoms occur to varying degrees.
For the correct diagnosis and treatment of pathological conditions that are associated with the abuse of AS, it is necessary to have good information about the effects of individual AS. This text brings basic knowledge about the effects of the most frequently abused AS in the Czech Republic.