A novel test procedure for antidepressants was designed in which a mouse is suspended by the tail from a lever, the movements of the animal being recorded. The total duration of the test (6 min) can be divided into periods of agitation and immobility. Several psychotropic drugs were studied: amphetamine, amitriptyline, atropine, desipramine, mianserin, nomifensine and viloxazine. Antidepressant drugs decrease the duration of immobility, as do psychostimulants and atropine. If coupled with measurement of locomotor activity in different conditions, the test can separate the locomotor stimulant doses from antidepressant doses. Diazepam increases the duration of immobility. The main advantages of this procedure are the use of a simple, objective test situation, the concordance of the results with the validated "behavioral despair" test from Porsolt and the sensitivity to a wide range of drug doses.

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Five hundred and sixty-nine alcoholics were included in a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized multicenter study of the effects of Acamprosate (calcium acetylhomotaurinate (CA), 1.3 g/day) on indicators of alcoholic relapse after withdrawal. One hundred and eighty-one patients in the CA group versus 175 in the placebo group completed the three-month study. The major efficacy criterion was plasma gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT), as an indicator of recent alcohol ingestion. This analysis was completed by criteria concordance analysis on a number of indicators of alcohol intake. Patients in both groups were similar initially. After 3 months of treatment, the patients in the CA group had significantly lower GGT (1.4 +/- 1.56 versus 2.0 +/- 3.19 times normal, P = 0.016). All significant differences (P less than 0.05) or trends (0.10 greater than P greater than 0.05) were in favor of a superior effect of CA over placebo. The major side-effect of CA was diarrhea (present in 13% of CA patients versus 7% of placebo, P = 0.04). CA proved superior to placebo on the evolution of markers of alcohol ingestion at three months, in this large-scale multicenter study. It could be a new modality in the drug therapy of alcoholism, not involving an antabuse effect, an antidepressant action, or conditioning.

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