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Medicine Proves a Promising Treatment in the Battle against Alcohol Dependence |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Researchers at the University of Virginia have led a multisite clinical trial showing that the drug topiramate is significantly more efficacious than placebo at curbing alcohol dependence. "Our finding in this national study was that topiramate is a safe and highly efficacious medicine that can be paired with a 15-minute brief intervention by health practitioners who are not addiction specialists. During the 14-week study published in the October 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, 371 male and female alcoholics, all of whom were drinking heavily at the time of entering the trial, were randomly selected to take topiramate (up to 300 mg/day) or placebo. Researchers approached the results as conservatively as possible, counting all dropouts or people who missed appointments as subjects who relapsed to their baseline drinking level. Even so, topiramate lowered the percentage of heavy drinking days (the number of days in which men and women consumed e5 drinks/day and e4 drinks/day, respectively, divided by the number of study days) by a mean of 8.44% more than placebo. In a second analysis that tested the study hypothesis for all randomized participants who took at least one study medication dose and had at least one double-blind site visit, topiramate was much more efficacious than placebo, lowering the percentage of heavy drinking days by a mean of 16.19% more than placebo. Additionally, for all secondary measures of self-reported drinking and the laboratory marker for drinking, gamma-glutamyltransferase in plasma, topiramate was more efficacious than placebo, according to both sets of analysis. Importantly, both of these sets of analysis demonstrate the consistency and robustness of topiramate's efficacy over placebo in treating alcohol dependence.
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