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Dual-drug therapy reduces methamphetamine use: a UCLA study
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
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A clinical trial of a two-drug therapy for methamphetamine use disorder showed a reduction in use of the highly addictive drug within 12 weeks of starting treatment, a UCLA-led study suggests.
Participants in the ADAPT-2 clinical trial who received a combination of injectable naltrexone and extended-release oral bupropion (NTX+BUPN) showed a 27% increase in negative methamphetamine tests, indicating a reduction in drug use, compared with 11% in the placebo group.
The study is published in the journal Addiction.
"These findings have important implications for the pharmacological treatment of methamphetamine use disorder. There is currently no FDA-approved medication to treat it, and the number of methamphetamine-related overdoses has increased significantly over the past decade," said Dr. Michael Lee, an assistant professor of family medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
Methamphetamine use continues to rise worldwide, increasing from 33 million people in 2010 to 34 million in 2020.
To help curb the current crisis, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) supported various trials, including the ADAPT-2 trial, to test the effects of different pharmacological treatments for methamphetamine use disorder. ADAPT-2 was conducted from May 23, 2017, to July 25, 2019, at eight trial sites, including UCLA. The study enrolled 403 participants, of whom 109 were assigned to the combination treatment group and the rest to a placebo group in the first phase.
The latest results concern the second stage of a multi-centre trial. The previous stage showed that the combination of the two drugs was effective at six weeks, but there was a question about whether the treatment's effectiveness was maintained over a longer period.
In the second phase, the researchers conducted urine tests on the participants at weeks seven and 12, and after treatment at weeks 13 and 16, comparing the NTX+BUPN group with the placebo group.
Further research is needed to determine whether the treatment effect lasts beyond 12 weeks and leads to further reductions in methamphetamine use, the researchers write.
“Previous trials of treatment for stimulant use disorder suggest that change in use is gradual (consistent with our findings), unlikely to lead to sustained abstinence over a typical 12-week trial, and dependent on the duration of treatment,” they write. “This calls for future clinical trials to quantify changes in methamphetamine use beyond 12 weeks and to determine the optimal duration of treatment with this drug.”