Could ketamine-assisted therapy help treat alcohol disorder?

This report comments: "A new £2.4 million phase III trial delivered through seven NHS sites across the UK will investigate whether ketamine-assisted therapy could help treat alcohol disorder ... The researchers behind the new trial commented that it "builds on a positive result" of an earlier phase ll trial – the Ketamine for Reduction of Alcohol Relapse (KARE) trial - which found that ketamine and therapy treatment was safe and tolerable for people with severe alcohol use disorder. Trial lead Professor Celia Morgan, University of Exeter, explained at the time that the number of alcohol-related deaths had "doubled" since the pandemic began, meaning new treatments are needed "more urgently than ever". Previously, there were some concerns about using ketamine in alcoholics due to liver problems, she explained, and added that this study had shown that ketamine is "safe and well-tolerated" in clinical conditions. "In fact, we found liver function improved in the ketamine group due to them drinking much less alcohol," she said. This earlier KARE study also showed that participants who had ketamine combined with therapy stayed completely sober, representing 87% abstinence in the 6-month follow-up. When this trial's results were published in The American Journal of Psychiatry the authors commented that "this was significantly higher than any of the other groups, indicating that the therapy may also have promise for preventing relapse, and that this group was more than 2.5 times more likely to stay completely abstinent at the end of the trial than those on placebo". "This combination showed benefits still seen 6 months later, in a group of people for whom many existing treatments just don’t work," Professor Morgan pointed out."

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