The fight against alcohol addiction has a new ally. The European Commission has given its approval to the European Medicines Agency to start the marketing in Europe of the first medicine against alcoholism.
The Lundbeck Company will be responsible for bringing this new drug to the market under the Selincro brand, after achieving positive results in clinical trials.
This pharmaceutical company has specialized in the treatment of mental illness for years and ensures that Selincro is the “main innovation” in treatments that seek to reduce dependence on alcoholic beverages
What is Selincro
- Selincro is a medication based on nalmefene, an opioid system modulator that, according to the company’s experts, acts on the brain’s reward circuitry, which is poorly regulated in patients with alcoholism problems. Specifically, the drug causes the onset of withdrawal symptoms.
- The results were obtained from a study on 2,000 patients, of which 60% saw their addiction to alcohol reduced after six months of treatment. 40% noticed beneficial results in just one month.
Alcohol, a deadly dependency
- According to the World Health Organization, excessive alcohol consumption causes 2.5 million deaths each year, of which 320,000 are young people between the ages of 15 and 29.
- In Europe, specifically, it ranks third among the risk factors for the global burden of disease and third worldwide. The pharmaceutical company Lundbeck hopes to bring Selincro to the first markets in the European Community in mid-2013.