In a video discussing his symposium at the 2015 International Liver Congress in Vienna, Lorenzo Leggio, M.D., Chief of the joint NIAAA-NIDA Section on Clinical Psychoneuroendocrinology and Neuropsychopharmacology, LCTS, presents new thoughts on the treatment of alcohol-use disorder (AUD) and alcoholic liver disease (ALD).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s true that when we have a patient with alcoholic liver disease, we want to treat the liver damage, but, on the other hand, it\u2019s very important to treat the underlying etiology, which is excessive alcohol use,\u201d says Dr. Leggio.<\/p>\n
Since liver toxicity is of significant concern for ALD patients, medications currently prescribed for AUD may be contraindicated due to the risk of doing further liver damage.\u00a0 Leggio discusses the importance of developing medications that are safe and effective for treating AUD in those with ALD, including tapping into existing medications that are not approved for AUD but that have shown promise in treating it.\u00a0 He includes such medications as gabapentin and baclofen in this group and notes that when his research group tested baclofen<\/a> in alcoholic patients with liver cirrhosis, they found it to be safe and effective in reducing drinking and improving liver tests.\u00a0 Leggio stresses not only the importance of continuing to develop new medications for alcoholic patients with AUD, but also the necessity of educating and training physicians so that they are well-equipped to treat patients with both alcohol use disorder and alcoholic liver disease.<\/p>\n \u201cAnother very important piece is that while our field is really growing more and more toward the development of new medications, it is equally important that the physicians eventually will prescribe these medications. So, as of today, there is still some misunderstanding sometimes, meaning that some physicians are not even aware that they could prescribe the medications for alcoholic patients,\u201d says Leggio. \u00a0\u201cIt is important to develop new medications but it is equally important to educate the future generation of physicians to make sure that they receive early on, during medical school, during training, the proper education in addiction medicine so that they will know when they will have patients in the office with alcohol dependence and with alcoholic liver disease that they can prescribe medications that will help patients reduce their craving and reduce their drinking.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a video discussing his symposium at the 2015 International Liver Congress in Vienna, Lorenzo Leggio, M.D., Chief of the joint NIAAA-NIDA Section on Clinical Psychoneuroendocrinology and Neuropsychopharmacology, LCTS, presents new thoughts on the treatment of alcohol-use disorder (AUD) and … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1551,"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions\/1551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pgdf.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}