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Record W4245403190 · doi:10.1176/appi.pn.2015.6b17

Varenicline Shows Promise for Reducing Alcohol Use

2015· article· en· W4245403190 on OpenAlex
Vabren Watts

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenuePsychiatric News · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicNeurological Disorders and Treatments
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsVareniclineCravingAlcohol use disorderPsychiatryAddictionMedicineSmoking cessationNicotineDrugPharmacologyAlcohol

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Clinical and Research NewsFull AccessVarenicline Shows Promise for Reducing Alcohol UseVabren WattsVabren WattsPublished Online:18 Jun 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2015.6b17AbstractResults from a phase 2 clinical trial show that in addition to curbing smoking, the drug varenicline reduces alcohol craving and consumption.For almost a decade, the drug varenicline—marketed by Pfizer as Chantix—has been spotlighted as a pharmacotherapy intended to help smokers quit smoking. Now the drug is in the spotlight for a different reason—its ability to reduce alcohol use. Daniel Falk, Ph.D., believes that compounds that target nicotinic acetylcholine receptors may serve as a therapy to help people reduce alcohol consumption.NIAAADuring APA's 2015 annual meeting last month in Toronto, Daniel Falk, Ph.D., a health science administrator for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), presented results from a phase 2 clinical trial that assessed the effectiveness and safety of varenicline in the treatment of alcohol use disorder."There is a high comorbidity between nicotine use and alcohol use," said Falk, who explained to Psychiatric News that one-third of Americans who use nicotine also use alcohol. Falk told Psychiatric News that he and his colleagues decided to study the off-label use of varenicline after the results of animal studies and small clinical trials found that the drug reduces alcohol craving and intake. Since the launch of varenicline as Chantix, Pfizer, the drug manufacturer, has paid out more than $275 million to settle thousands of lawsuits claiming that the drug caused adverse psychiatric symptoms such as suicidal ideation. In 2009, a black-box warning for the drug was mandated by the Food and Drug Administration. Falk and colleagues' phase 2 trial included 200 adult smokers and nonsmokers with alcohol use disorder, in accordance with DSM-IV, who were administered 2 mg of varenicline daily or a placebo for 13 weeks. According to Falk, the study participants consisted mostly of males who had been engaging in frequent heavy drinking (five or more drinks a day) for an average of 20 years. The participants had no history of other drug use or psychiatric disorders.The results showed that participants taking varenicline had an average of 33 percent fewer heavy drinking days over the course of the trial compared with the placebo group. In addition, the varenicline cohort was on average 13 percent more likely to abstain from daily alcohol use. Participants reported symptoms of nausea, constipation, and chest pains, but no psychiatric symptoms. "The treatment worked well in both nonsmokers and smokers," said Falk, who mentioned during his session presentation that smokers involved in the study were also able to reduce smoking as expected. Falk hypothesized that the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, which has been shown to be involved in the rewarding effects of both nicotine and alcohol use, may be responsible for this outcome. "We are definitely interested in doing more research with compounds that target the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, like varenicline, in the treatment of alcohol use disorder, and we encourage other alcohol use disorder researchers to do the same."Falk informed Psychiatric News that, as far as he knows, Pfizer is not planning to market varenicline as a therapy to treat alcohol use disorder. ■A video interview of Falk discussing varenicline's use in the treatment of alcohol disorders can be viewed here. ISSUES NewArchived

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.211
Threshold uncertainty score0.555

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.158
GPT teacher head0.340
Teacher spread0.181 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it