Manic-depressive disorder
Aripiprazole has been currently approved, by US Food and Drug Administration to treat bipolar disorder as well as schizophrenia, to treat manic-depressive disorder and schizophrenia.A new study suggests that it importantly and dose-dependently increases the sedative effects of alcohol and, to a lesser degree, lessens the ecstatic sort of effects of alcohol.

The following results have been published in the April issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Dopamine partial agonist

R. Kranzler, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut Health Center and corresponding author for the study explains “Aripiprazole is a dopamine partial agonist,”He further adds”Since dopamine has involvment in the rewarding effects of alcohol, we thought that aripiprazole might lessen those effects.” According to Raymond F. Anton, distinct University Professor and director of the Clinical Neurobiology Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina “Aripiprazole is an unusual drug in that it has different pharmacological effects at different doses and it might do one thing acutely and another during chronic dosing,”.

Static ataxia

Researchers included 18 social drinkers from the community: nine men and nine women between the ages of 21 and 45 years of age.Each participant finished three experimental sessions in a randomized sequence; receiving on the day before the laboratory session either no medication, or 2.5 mg or 10 mg of aripiprazole.During each session, participants drank three standard drinks, for a total of 0.8 g/kg of alcohol for the men, and 0.7 g/kg for the women.Some subjective effects and breath alcohol concentrations, heart rate, blood pressure, static ataxia were measured regularly throughout the laboratory sessions.

Alcoholism

“Discoveries show that aripiprazole made the drinkers sleepier and they noticed less pleasure from alcohol than they might have without it,” stated Kranzler.

Anton further added that Aripiprazole might ‘change the balance’ from alcohol being more stimulating to being more sedating,”

Kranzler agreed that other antipsychotic drugs - such as haloperidol and, olanzapine, which were full dopamine antagonists – reduced the pleasurable impacts of alcohol but they were linked with more adverse effects than aripiprazole was. The list of side effects associated with most medications that exert powerful enough effects to be of value in treating psychosis is long.

“Aripiprazole is one of increasing lists of medications that are being evaluated for the treatment of alcoholism,” stated Anton. According to Kranzler “That having been said, it’s unclear whether aripiprazole will be very useful in this effort because its side effects may outweigh its beneficial effects.”

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