Topiramate Treatment of Alcohol Use Disorders in African Americans

Summary

Participation Requirements

Description

Objective(s): Despite having lower rates of drinking and heavy drinking than European Americans (EAs), African Americans (AA) have significantly higher rates of mortality from a variety of alcohol-related conditions, including liver cirrhosis, accidents, and violence. The current proposal aims to im...

Objective(s): Despite having lower rates of drinking and heavy drinking than European Americans (EAs), African Americans (AA) have significantly higher rates of mortality from a variety of alcohol-related conditions, including liver cirrhosis, accidents, and violence. The current proposal aims to improve alcohol treatment in AA Veterans, who comprise 12% of the Veteran population. Research Design: The proposed study is a two-arm, randomized 12-week, parallel-groups comparison of topiramate versus placebo to reduce the frequency of heavy drinking days and increase the number of abstinent days in 160 AA patients with AUD. Methodology: The following specific aim is used to direct the methods: Specific Aim 1. Understanding health disparities. Aim 1 will focus on the screening process, using the screening outcomes data, including reasons for patients declining to participate in the trial, to conduct descriptive analyses of the screening process and recruitment efforts. We will supplement this description by examining changes in drinking and motivation for treatment before and during the pandemic. In the resultant manuscript, we will also discuss strategies for recruiting a minority population to participate in addiction treatment studies. Specific Aim 2. Future study planning with safety results. Aim 2 will focus on assessing the safety and tolerability of topiramate dosing, which will provide the basis for evaluating the risks associated with topiramate treatment for reducing heavy drinking in AAs. The additional participants will greatly improve our effect size estimate, pooling across sites; for example, the width of a confidence interval on a difference in means at the end of the study based on a sample of size 80 will be 61% of the width of a corresponding confidence interval based on a sample of size 30. In addition, two sites will also provide information on treatment-by-site heterogeneity, which will be useful for informing the design of a multi-site trial, which we believe is the best option for recruiting an adequate sample for a well powered efficacy trial. To increase the number of subjects exposed to topiramate treatment, we will randomize participants to a 2:1 ratio of topiramate to placebo treatment. Specific Aim 3. Combined analysis with available RCT datasets. We have data available from two completed RCTs of topiramate that used a design almost identical to that of the present study (n's = 138 and 170, including 16 AAs). We plan to conduct an analysis that combines the data from the three trials, to test for differences in efficacy by population group (i.e., AAs and EAs), and to compare adverse event profiles across population groups. Combining the datasets will allow analyses that incorporate individual-level heterogeneity, in contrast to meta-analyses, where typically only group comparisons would be possible. This will be accomplished using de-identified data from each study. Impact/Significance: The proposal is innovative in that it will focus on AAs with AUD, an understudied and underserved population for whom no such data currently exist. Given the far-reaching effects of AUD and its high prevalence among Veterans, added evidence based treatments may realize reduced health care costs from unnecessary ED visits and reduced complications of illnesses such as hepatitis C and congestive heart failure.

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