Exercise as adjunctive treatment for alcohol use disorder: A randomized controlled trial

Abstract

AimsTo examine whether physical activity as an adjunct to outpatient alcohol treatment has an effect on alcohol consumption following participation in an exercise intervention of six months’ duration, and at 12 months after treatment initiation.MethodsThe study is a randomized controlled study with three arms: Patients allocated to (A) treatment as usual, (B) treatment as usual and supervised group exercise, (C) treatment as usual and individual physical exercise. The primary outcome measure was excessive drinking six months after treatment start and completion of the intervention. A logistic regression model was used to evaluate the odds of excessive drinking among the three groups, based on intention-to-treat. Changes in level of physical activity in all three groups were tested by using a generalized linear mixed model. A multiple linear model was used to test if there was an association between amount of performed physical activity and alcohol consumption.ResultsA total of 175 patients (68.6% male) participated. Response rates were 77.7% at six months and 57.1% at 12 months follow-up. OR 0.99 [95% CI: 0.46; 2.14], p = 0.976 for excessive drinking in the group exercise condition, and 1.02 [95% CI: 0.47; 2.18], p = 0.968 in the individual exercise condition, which, when compared to the control group as reference, did not differ statistically significantly. Participants with moderate level physical activity had lower odds for excessive drinking OR = 0.12 [0.05; 0.31], p<0.001 than participants with low level physical activity. Amount of alcohol consumption in the intervention groups decreased by 4% [95% CI: 0.03; 6.8], p = 0.015 for each increased exercising day.ConclusionsNo direct effect of physical exercise on drinking outcome was found. Moderate level physical activity was protective against excessive drinking following treatment. A dose-response effect of exercise on drinking outcome supports the need for implementing physically active lifestyles for patients in treatment for alcohol use disorder.

The Benefits of Physical Exercise on Mental Disorders and Quality of Life in Substance Use Disorders Patients. Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Of the 59 studies, 24 include only AUD patients [4][5][6]29,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][77][78][79][80], 15 include patients who met criteria for different substances disorders, describing groups among which are AUD or SUD patients [13,14,16,18,20,26,28,[62][63][64]66,67,70,72], eight studies include methamphetamine dependence patients [10][11][12]17,27,68,73,76], five studies include heroin or opioids dependence patients [21,25,30,65,...…”

“…Of the selected studies, 34 were experimental studies with randomized sampling [4,5,8,9,11,12,15,17,18,21,25,27,29,30,46,48,49,52,54,55,[59][60][61][63][64][65][68][69][70][71][74][75][76][77], while the rest were quasi-experimental [6,7,10,13,14,16,20,22,26,28,47,50,51,53,[56][57][58]62,…”

Saying yes or no to physical activity – A comparative cohort analysis of patients seeking treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder

“…The Healthy Lifestyle Study (K. K. Roessler et al, 2017 ; Sengul Sari et al, 2013 ) was one of five RESCueH-studies ( Nielsen et al, 2016 ) using different approaches of non-pharmacological interventions for AUD. The Healthy Lifestyle study was a randomized controlled trial, and participation was offered to all consecutive patients who sought treatment for AUD at the Alcohol Treatment Clinic in Odense, Denmark during the period of inclusion.…”

“…This high number of AUD patients, who are overlooked, not interested in participating, claim interest but do not show up or do not adhere to intervention in controlled trials including exercise is, in other words, not uncommon ( Bichler et al, 2017 ; Brown et al, 2009 ; Brown et al, 2010 ; Roessler et al, 2017 ). Actually, it seems to be rather the rule than the exception, hence we may assume that it also have occurred in studies that do not describe refusal rates ( Kendzor et al, 2008 ; Mamen, Pallesen, & Martinsen, 2011 ).…”

Alcohol relapse and near-relapse experiences show that relapse models need to be updated

“…The study was approved by the National Committee on Health Research Ethics and the Danish Data Protection Agency. This study originated from a larger study, the RESCueH Programme (Nielsen et al, 2016;Roessler, Bilberg, Nielsen, Jensen, Ekstrøm & Sari, 2017).…”