An American team has just tested a drug derived from benzazepine in adults who stutter. After a few weeks of treatment, they saw a reduction in symptoms.
It is an experimental drug – first tested for the treatment of schizophrenia or to offset certain effects of cocaine – which could change the lives of people who stutter. And they are numerous – it is estimated that there are 60 million stutterers in the world, including around 700,000 in France – and sometimes famous such as Napoleon, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Louis Jouvet or Albert Einstein.
A team led by a psychiatrist from the University of California, Riverside, has just tested ecopipam, a derivative of benzazepine, on adults suffering from this handicap. As a result, after eight weeks of treatment, their stuttering symptoms had been reduced: increased fluency of speech, faster reading and shorter duration of stuttering events.
High levels of dopamine associated with this disorder
Stuttering, which most often begins in childhood, has no precisely identified cause. But dopamine, a neurotransmitter, is known to play an important role in how stuttering is caused in the brain. Since high levels of dopamine are associated with this speech disorder, it is this neurotransmitter that has been targeted to reduce symptoms. But most of the drugs tested until today had caused significant side effects such as movement disorders or metabolic abnormalities.
These negative effects were not observed in the work carried out at Riverside, the results of which have just been published in the Annals of Clinical Psychiatry. The explanation is that ecopipam selectively blocks the actions of dopamine at the level of its receptor, a receptor which can belong to two large families, those of the D1 or D2 receptors. Ecopipam only blocks dopamine at D1 receptors and therefore may work differently than other medicines.
“No serious adverse effects”
“Participants tolerated ecopipam well, showed no serious adverse effects, no patient required discontinuation, and no signs of weight gain or movement disorder, events that may accompany other medications used. to treat stuttering have been observed,” said Dr. Gerald Maguire, who led the study.
The patients who took part in this study, nine adult men, started on 50 milligrams a day of ecopipam for two weeks and then 100 milligrams a day for the last six weeks of the trial. Of the five patients that could be evaluated at the end of this trial, three who suffered from a moderate stutter experienced significant improvements, the other two who had a severe stutter experienced more modest gains.
Gerald Maguire announces for the beginning of 2020 a new test of ecopipam as part of a larger clinical trial involving around 100 people.
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