Stuttering is a speech disorder that is very embarrassing for people who have it. In the United States, a psychiatrist has been hoping for several years for a treatment thanks to an experimental drug.
Stuttering is a disorder affecting the rate of speech . This is characterized by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words and sentences. It is also a question of involuntary pauses during which the person is unable to produce a sound. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines stuttering as "speech characterized by frequent repetition of sounds and syllables or by frequent hesitations or pauses, for at least 3 months" . The organization classifies it among the emotional or behavioral disorders.
Obviously, this disorder affects about 70 million people in the world is the subject of various research and most today focus on the links it has with the functioning of the brain. Among these multiple studies, psychiatry expert Gerald Maguire from the University of California at Riverside (United States) is interested in the role of dopamine. Considered to be the hormone of happiness, it is able to increase or slow down the activity of neurons depending on the nerve receptor to which it attaches.
Since the 1990s, Gerald Maguire and his team are among the few researchers who perform scintigraphy on stutterers. This technique for evaluating cerebral perfusion gave scientists the possibility of observing excessive dopaminergic activity in the brains of volunteers. After learning of these results, Gerald Maguire began to think that blocking the action of dopamine might reduce stuttering.
So far, the expert has conducted clinical trials in which he prescribed antipsychotics . The goal? Block dopamine. However, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not yet approved this type of treatment due to the various side effects it induces. It can indeed cause weight gain, muscle stiffness and depression. However, in August 2019, Gerald Maguire published a latest study on the Europe PubMed Central platform in which there is talk of a new drug:ecopipam.
According to the expert, the treatment makes it possible to block dopamine at the level of certain dopaminergic receptors. The experiment carried out on a dozen people showed a better fluidity in their speech . These rather encouraging results allow Gerald Maguire to remain optimistic, so much so that he wishes to conduct a larger scale trial with this drug.
