According to Dutch researcher Wendy Ooteman, the biological and genetic characteristics of alcoholics can predict which drugs will best suppress the desire to drink. Naltrexone and acamprosate are drugs that are supposed to suppress the desire for a drink. The researcher investigated which patient characteristics were responsible for predicting the drug that would work best.The article claims that clinical characteristics are poor predictors of naltrexone/acomprosate response and that biological and genetic factors are better predictors. We'll see. I'm not an expert, but it seems that naltrexone studies most often find a modest response in people with low severity alcohol problems. Acomprosate seems to be less consistent.
What's more interesting is that we may be drifting back toward a typology of addition. This could be good or bad - time will tell.
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