Re: interesting article on race and naltrexone tolerance

[Guest guest]



Query: If Asians are so nicotine intolerant then why does almost every man in China smoke? When we were there we could hardly breathe because of the smoke and our guide told us that it (smoke) is the social thing to do .

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 19:15:18 EST noclue915@... writes:

Tuesday November 16, 2004

Differing responses

I refer to Marina Mahathir’s article Ideology over science Studies have shown that there is a biological difference between Caucasians and Asians that will affect the efficacy of certain drugs. While the same drug will function the same way in every body, its effectiveness may not be the same for people of different races. Take nicotine, for example. Studies have shown that a large percentage of Asians are nicotine-intolerant compared to Caucasians. People who cannot tolerate nicotine generally cannot tolerate naltrexone, and this has major implications on the usage of naltrexone to treat substance abuse. Since most drug trials are conducted on Caucasian patients, it is assumed but not proven that it works exactly the same on Asians. That is not to say that the drug will behave any differently in an Asian, but that it may not be as efficient, or perhaps a different dosage is required, or if a majority of Asians are intolerant to the drug (for example, suffer heavy side-effects vs light side-effects for Caucasians), then the drug is not a viable option. There is scientific evidence to support this, just not a whole lot because there aren’t that many Asians to experiment on in the United States. Methadone has been proven effective in weaning people off heroin, but the patients later become hooked on methadone. As the above has not been studied on Asian populations, it’s a great leap to extrapolate the results from Caucasians to Asians.