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Local Study Tests Drug for Alcohol Withdrawal: SMDC RESEARCH: Physicians Are Testing the Effectiveness of an Inexpensive Relaxant.

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 June 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Brandon Stahl, Duluth News-Tribune, Minn.

Jun. 6--Doctors Raza Khan and Jeffrey Lyon typically treat two to three patients a day for alcohol withdrawal syndrome at St. Mary's Medical Center in Duluth.

Many of those patients, the two hospitalists said, are chronic alcoholics who come in for treatment of a related ailment, such as liver problems, and are forced to stop drinking once they're treated at the hospital.

Going through withdrawal can be slow, painful and even life-threatening, the doctors said. Because alcohol depresses the central nervous system, severe alcoholics forced to abruptly withdraw from alcohol can experience symptoms as mild as rapid heartbeat and shakes and as severe such as suppressed breathing, hallucinations, seizures and, in rare cases, death.

Lyon said current treatments involve slow-acting,Valium-like drugs that essentially tranquilize patients, requiring some to be put on a ventilator.

Last year, as the doctors sought a better way to treat their patients, Khan found a study in Italy in which five patients suffering from alcohol withdrawal were given Baclofen, a muscle relaxant that Lyon said is decades old and used mostly to treat spinal cord injuries.

"The study said they came down from the symptoms within zero to three hours," Khan said. "It seemed too good to believe."

Last January, the two doctors decided to do more formal research to determine whether the drug was effective.

The study, which is funded by the Duluth Clinic Foundation, is one of several research projects being done by SMDC.

Julia Pattison-Chrisoftomo, clinical research development manager, said SMDC conducted 209 research projects involving 72 doctors and 2,147 patients at the health care system from June 2004 to June 2005.

For Khan and Lyon's study, Pattison-Chrisoftomo said nurses are on call at all times waiting for a patient who exhibits alcohol withdrawal symptoms. If that patient consents to being part of the research, they're given either Baclofen or a placebo along with the typical treatment for alcohol withdrawal.

Lyon said Baclofen is believed to work on patients suffering from withdrawal by suppressing nerve receptors that go haywire when alcohol is taken away from them.

While 38 patients have participated in the study thus far, the doctors won't have a large enough sample until 50 take part.

Khan and Lyon hope that happens by the end of the year, but finding patients who meet the criteria has proved challenging. Because of the almost random nature of alcohol withdrawal syndrome, even patients who come into the hospital with high blood-alcohol levels might not go through withdrawal symptoms.

"You never know who is withdrawing from alcohol," Khan said.

Neither Khan nor Lyon said they'll know the results of the study until the end of the year; they don't even know if the drug has shown any type of success or failure.

"There's only one person who knows, and that's our biostatistician, and she's not telling us," Lyon said.

But if the drug is shown effective, the doctors said it could have a dramatic effect on treating alcohol withdrawal. The drug would reduce pain and likelihood of violent symptoms, they said, while also reducing time required at a hospital and the need to use other drugs to treat alcohol withdrawal.

"If someone is at a detox center, for example, and are given the drug and the drug works," Lyon said, "then perhaps fewer people would need to be transferred to a hospital."

Because the drug comes in pill form and is inexpensive to produce -- because no drug company owns a patent on it -- there is also the possibility Baclofen could be prescribed for home use.

"It could probably be given at 10 cents a dose," he said.

The doctors plan to publish the results of their study in a medical journal.

"Ideally its use would be adopted on a widespread basis," Lyon said.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Duluth News-Tribune, Minn.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: Duluth News-Tribune (Duluth, Minn.)

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