Successful Treatment of Chronic Resistant Alcoholism by Deep Brain Stimulation of Nucleus Accumbens: First Experience with Three Cases

Treatment of alcohol dependence remains one of the biggest challenges in psychiatry, since only about half of all patients achieve long-term abstinence by the currently available therapies. Dysfunction of the nucleus accumbens, one of the main areas of the brain's reward system, seems to play a central role in addiction and treatment resistance. Following the recent advances of neuromodulation therapy by deep brain stimulation, we designed an off-label single patient study protocol to treat patients with severe and long-standing alcoholism in whom other treatment options had failed. We report here on the first three patients with alcoholism who received deep brain stimulation. In the one-year follow-up period, two remained abstinent, while one showed a remarkable reduction of days while drinking and none had any significant adverse effects.