According to a new study, acamprosate reduces the number of patients being treated for alcoholism who go back to drinking alcohol. The drug also showed moderate benefits in trials when used in addition to non-drug treatments.
The study researchers reviewed data from 24 randomized controlled trials. These included 6,915 alcohol dependent patients who were also having concurrent psychosocial therapies. Acamprosate prevented alcohol relapse in one in every nine patients who had stopped drinking. The drug increased the number of days that patients spent not drinking by an average of three days every month. The study indicated that the risk of a patient on acamprosate returning to drinking was 86 percent of that of a patient who took a placebo pill in the study.
"Acamprosate is certainly no magic bullet, but it is a safe and effective treatment for patients who are trying to stop drinking," said lead study researcher Susanne Rosner of Psychiatric Hospital at the University of Munich in Germany. "The benefits we have seen in these trials are small. However, we must remember that these are additional benefits on top of those from other non-drug therapies."
The study researchers stress the need to respect a patient’s right to choose treatment by providing all the positive and negative aspects of the drugs when recommending a therapeutic approach.
"Patients’ doubs and reservations against a strategy that uses one substance to treat dependency on another should be taken seriously, while interventions that have been shown to work should not be kept back from patients," said Rosner.
