The following drug is used recently in Alcohol dependence patients
High-Yield Explanation
(B) Naltrexone # Rehabilitation of Alcoholics> While the mainstay of alcoholic rehabilitation involves counseling, education, and cognitive approaches, several medications might be useful.> The first is the opioid-antagonist drug Naltrexone, 50 to 150 mg/d, which has been reported in several small-scale, short-term studies to decrease the probability of a return to drinking and to shorten periods of relapse.> However, at least one longer-term large-scale trial questioned the superiority of naltrexone to placebo, and more studies are required before the cost-effectiveness of this approach can be established.> A second medication, acamprosate (Campral), 2 g/d, has been tested in >5000 patients in Europe, with results that appear similar to those reported for naltrexone.> Several long-term trials of naltrexone and acamprosate, used individually and in combination, are in progress, and early results are promising.> A third medication, which has historically been used in the treatment of alcoholism, is the ALDH inhibitor disulfiram.> In doses of 250 mg/d this drug produces an unpleasant (and potentially dangerous) reaction in the presence of alcohol, a phenomenon related to rapidly rising blood levels of the first metabolite of alcohol, acetaldehyde.