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Skin Disease Medication Also Effective in Alcohol Use Disorder Treatment
A pill used to treat a common skin disease was found to reduce alcohol consumption by more than half among patients diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, according to findings published recently by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and other institutions.
Results of the study were published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Apremilast is an FDA-approved anti-inflammatory medication used to treat psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. The medication was identified as a potential treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) by researchers from OHSU who since 2015 had been searching a genetic database for compounds likely to counteract the expression of genes previously linked to heavy alcohol use.
The OHSU researchers tested apremilast in 2 animal models with a genetic risk of excessive drinking, as well as in mice at other labs. In each case, apremilast reduced alcohol consumption by triggering an increase in activity in the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain that is involved with controlling alcohol intake.
The use of apremilast to treat AUD in people was then tested by researchers at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. A double-blind, placebo-controlled, clinical proof-of-concept study assessed 51 patients over 11 days of treatment. The trial participants had not been seeking AUD treatment.
Alcohol consumption by trial participants was reduced from an average of 5 drinks per day to 2.
“Apremilast’s large effect size on reducing drinking, combined with its good tolerability in our participants, suggests it is an excellent candidate for further evaluation as a novel treatment for people with alcohol use disorder,” co-senior author Barbara Mason, Ph.D., Pearson Family professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps, said in a news release.
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