Study Shows Most Treatment Effective Against Alcoholism
From Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs News:
A complex study of alcoholism treatment medications and counseling has found that most standalone and combined therapies were effective in promoting short-term abstinence, with only the drug acamprosate (Campral) proving to be disappointing.
The three-year COMBINE study, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, involved 1,383 subjects who were diagnosed as alcohol-dependent and had recently quit drinking.
Patients were broken into smaller study groups, including those who received 16 weeks of naltrexone (100 mg/d) or acamprosate (3 g/d), both, with or without placebos, and with or without a combined behavioral intervention (CBI).
One group received CBI only, with no pills.
Some groups also received medication management -- counseling to ensure that patients took their medication and remained abstinent from alcohol.
The best results were found among those who received naltrexone (ReVia) and medication management, who stayed abstinent 80.6 percent of the days in the study period.
Also found highly effective were CBI plus medical management and placebos (79.2 percent) and naltrexone and CBI plus medical management (77.1 percent).
One was that acamprosate was no more effective than placebo alone, and two, that while naltrexone was effective in its own right, combining it with the specialized counseling added no more effectiveness than naltrexone by itself," study author Raymond Anton of the Medical University of South Carolina told Reuters.
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