It is the worst addiction and the most socially devastating disease, as doctors say. Alcoholism affects 2 million French people and kills 50,000 each year, recalls Claudine Proust in The Parisian.
A shameful disease for society, disarmed doctors to relieve it, the only alternative for patients was abstinence. Or the descent into hell. As Christophe Billoret tells it in the columns of the daily newspaper. From the age of 43, this Parisian graphic designer went to bed drunk every night. With this same destructive ritual: a desire that took to the guts around 6 p.m. and, in the end, three and a half liters of wine daily.
At 50, Christophe can go eight days without a drink and his occasional drinks do not exceed half a bottle in a meal. This resurrection – which he recounts in a book (1) – he owes to Baclofen. This drug, used as a muscle relaxant, obtained last year “temporary authorization” in alcohol withdrawal. The two clinical studies, which will be published next December, should confirm the effectiveness of this molecule to support patients in weaning.
And after 20 years of therapeutic desert, another drug should soon complete the arsenal:Alcover. If this name means nothing to most of us, the molecule that goes into its composition is well known. Gamma-hydroxybutyrate, otherwise known as GHB, is none other than “the date rape drug”. But in the fight against alcohol, it works miracles. “Tested on 496 patients from nine countries, including France, it achieved an average abstinence rate of 75% after three months, specifies Caroline Proust.
Finally, the third drug, on the market for a month, the Selincro, does not aim at total abstinence, but at the reduction of consumption. Its mode of action in the brain helps to curb the irrepressible urge to drink alcohol. 280,000 patients could use it and the studies, here too, are encouraging.
Three molecules that help patients rebuild themselves. “To be cured, says Christophe, is to find oneself in front of a precipice: ten-twelve-hour days without being drunk that one is no longer used to occupying, the abyss of everything one has broken… “
(1) There is always an after (the Arenas, €17).
