Counseling and a drug that blocks the brain’s pleasure receptors can effectively treat alcoholism without the expense of checking into specialised clinics, said a study released on Tuesday.
”Medical care works, and alcoholics don’t need to check into a specialty treatment programme to get it,” said Robert Swift, an author of the report appearing in the May 3 Journal of the American Medical Association.
”We found that in just nine 20-minute sessions with a medical professional, in conjunction with naltrexone or intensive counseling, yields good results,” said Swift, referring to the drug naltrexone.
In the largest ever clinical trial of behavorial and drug treatments for alcoholism, the US National Institutes of Health sponsored the study of 1 383 patients at 11 US clinics.
Patients were divided into nine groups, each of which received for 16 weeks a different treatment regime consisting of some combination of counseling plus drugs or a placebo.
The drug naltrexone reduced alcohol cravings in some patients studied but another drug, acamprosate, which also modifies brain receptors, proved ineffective, which the study’s authors called surprising.
All groups improved, the study said, most likely because of medical follow up, an approached borrowed from treatment of diabetes, hypertension and other chronic diseases in which doctors meet consistently with patients.
”Having someone check on a patient’s progress, assess their health and provide encouragement — routine practice in treating high blood pressure or diabetes — speaks to the power of sustained, professional medical care,” Swift said.
Of the eight million alcoholics in the United States, less than a million receive treatment, said Swift, director of alcoholism treatment at Brown University medical school in the US state of Virginia.
”The finding that alcoholism can be treated in a primary care setting is good news,” said Richard Longabaugh, a psychiatry professor at Brown.
”This makes confronting the disease a lot simpler, and this should make effective treatment available to a much larger number of people who need it,” said Longabaugh, a co-author of the study. – AFP
