Kudzu and its extracts and flowers have been used in traditional Chinese folk medicine to treat alcoholism for about 1,000 years, Medical News Today reports. Kudzu contains daidzin, an anti-drinking substance. Daidzin inhibits human aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH-2), which metabolizes alcohol into acetaldehyde. Inhibiting ALDH-2 promotes the accumulation of acetaldehyde, which has aversive effects. A recent test of a synthetic ALDH-2 inhibitor (CVT-10216) on rodents shows that it reduces drinking and prevents relapse by increasing acetaldehyde while drinking and later decreasing dopamine in the brain region that controls relapse during abstinence.
"I think the over-arching issue here is medical treatment," said Ivan Diamond, vice president of neuroscience at Gilead Science, Professor Emeritus of neurology, cellular and molecular pharmacology and neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco, and corresponding author for the study.
"Alcoholism is a medical disorder, not just a problem of will power," he said. "Physicians treat medical disorders in order to prevent harm, while not necessarily curing the disease being treated – for example, drug treatment of hypertension, statins for high cholesterol, insulin for diabetes – and the same will become true for treating alcoholism. Heavy drinking causes harm. We need to prevent heavy drinking in order to prevent harm."
Diamond added that relapse may be the biggest problem facing physicians today. "We are talking about a patient who has the motivation to undergo a very unpleasant detoxification to try to stop drinking, and then gets into trouble afterward," he said. "Nearly 80 percent of abstinent alcoholics or addicts relapse within a year. Current therapies for alcoholism help, but we can do much better."
"Extracts of various parts of the kudzu vine have been used in many Chinese herbal medicine formulas and are said to be helpful in treating a variety of maladies, including alcoholism and intoxication," said Ting-Kai Li, a professor in the department of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center, and former director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "Recent research has found that several compounds of the isoflavone family – puerarin, daidzin, daidzein – in the kudzu extract decrease alcohol intake in experimental animals."
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