Conditions: Alcoholism Sleep Initiation and Maintenance Disorders
Keywords: Alcoholism Insomnia Quetiapine Seroquel
Allocation: RANDOMIZED | Intervention model: PARALLEL
Enrollment: 22
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
The primary purpose of this study is to determine how efficacy of quetiapine (seroquel XR) in improving the sleep in recovering alcohol dependent subjects.

Detailed description:
Sober alcohol dependent subjects frequently complain of difficulty falling asleep as well as staying asleep which may eventually lead to relapse. Novel antipsychotic medications such as quetiapine have shown some efficacy in treating alcoholism and have also shown some benefit in improving insomnia.

The primary aim of this study is to determine the degree to which quetiapine improves sleep in veterans during the early phase of recovery from alcohol dependence. The sleep efficiency from an in-lab polysomnogram will be the primary outcome measure. Secondary measures of sleep will include the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Insomnia Severity Index, and actigraphy. Other additional aims will explore for alcohol use and cravings, change in psychiatric symptoms using the The Time Line Follow Back measure, Penn Alcohol Craving Scale (PACS), the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 item scale (PHQ-9), and the Beck's Anxiety Inventory (BAI) respectively.

Twenty four subjects within the first year of sobriety will be enrolled. Participants will be undergo an extensive baseline screening procedure. After 2 consecutive in-laboratory polysomnograms they will be treated with either Quetiapine XR or matching placebo pills targetting a dose of 400 mg a night. The treatment duration will be 8 weeks and during the eight week of treatment they will undergo 2 more nights of in-laboratory polysomnogram. All subjects will also receive Medical Management therapy, a standardized psychosocial intervention which is medically-based and focusses on alcohol abstinence and medication compliance.

Arms:
arm 1: Quetiapine XR arm 2: Placebo

Interventions: intervention 1: Quetiapine XR intervention 2: Placebo.
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: Quetiapine is a second generation antipsychotic medication, which has also recently shown to be associated with properties of mood stabilization in bipolar disorder. intervention 2: Inactive or inert pill which will be used as a comparator.

Protocol document: