For people with severe alcohol use disorder, a new gene therapy trial could lead to an effective treatment that would involve chemically rebalancing the area of the brain associated with addiction.
alone, there's generally more than 100,000 deaths [in the United States] per year,” said Dr. Tucker Woods, associate medical director of Lenox Health Greenwich Village in New York City, who was not part of the study. “And just think about the impacts on families when somebody's addicted. The impact is not just to that patient, it's also their family and friends.
For the research, a team at Oregon Health & Science University , in Portland, tested a form of gene therapy used to treat Parkinson's disease, with the goal of resetting theThe scientists inserted a gene called glial-derived neurotrophic factor into the region of the brain whereexists in four of the monkeys, via a type of brain surgery called a craniotomy. GDNF stimulates cell growth, and the scientists discovered the gene effectively reset the monkeys' brain reward pathways.
“A big problem in treating alcohol use disorder is the return to drinking after abstinence is achieved. So that's really what we wanted to address,” said senior study co-author Dr. Kathleen Grant, a professor and chief of the division of neuroscience at OHSU's Oregon National Primate Research Center.
“It's the first demonstration in monkeys that this constitutively active increase in dopamine can, in fact, lower drinking levels down to near zero," she explained. "So, we're concluding that this is probably a really viable target.”. “This is an irreversible treatment. So, it would only be appropriate in the most severe cases that have already shown that other therapeutic approaches are not effective in the chronic drinker,” she explained.Alcohol-related deaths are the fourth-leading preventable cause of death in the United States, one study showed.
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