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An herbal supplement made from kudzu, a plant long used in traditional medicine from East Asia, may offer a new way to help people cut back on binge drinking, according to a UC San Francisco study.

Researchers found that people with alcohol use disorder who took kudzu when they expected they might drink heavily had fewer binge-drinking days than those who received a placebo. The benefits were still evident three months after treatment ended.

Binge drinking is a major public health problem, accounting for more than half of the roughly 80,000 annual U.S. deaths attributed to excessive alcohol consumption. Yet fewer than 10% of people with alcohol use disorder have ever received medication to treat it.

"Binge drinking is incredibly common, but we don't have many tools to offer people who want to cut back," said Glenn-Milo Santos, Ph.D., MPH, the study's lead author and a UCSF professor of community health systems. "Our goal is to expand that toolkit. What's exciting about this approach is that people can use it when they know they may be at risk of heavy drinking, rather than taking a medication every day."

The study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on Nov. 4, included 120 adults with alcohol use disorder who binge drank at least once a week. For men, binge drinking was defined as having five or more drinks on one occasion, and for women, it was four or more.

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