Credit: UT Southwestern Medical Center
DALLAS - Jan. 13, 2021 - A new treatment that combines two existing medications may provide long-sought relief for many battling debilitating methamphetamine use disorder, according to a study to be published tomorrow in
The article, based on a multisite study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), describes how combining an injectable drug currently used to treat alcohol and opioid addictions (naltrexone), and a commonly prescribed antidepressant (bupropion) produced positive results in 13.6 percent of the 403 patients treated, significantly higher than the 2.5 percent response in placebo groups. This is an important advance given that there are now no effective treatments for methamphetamine use disorder, says Madhukar Trivedi, M.D., a UT Southwestern professor of psychiatry and first author of the study.