Founded & Designed in Great Britain...
ZenaMed is a British company developing technological solutions that help people abstain from alcohol.
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ZenaMed’s device is a unique hand held, dual sensor breath analyser that detects both disulfiram metabolites and alcohol on breath.
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The ZenaMed Treatment System can provide remote support and monitoring on a daily basis, delivering intensive care for those who need to abstain and reducing the need for routine face-to-face review.
ZenaMed’s Treatment System can also be used in clinic to obtain objective confirmation of disulfiram compliance.
The ZenaMed Treatment System:
Conceived by doctors
Launched by ZenaMed
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The Team...
Doctors at ZenaMed have many years full time experience in providing treatment for alcohol addiction.
The team is made up of:
A consultant addictions specialist and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists who holds a UK National Award for Clinical Excellence, and is past Secretary of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Addictions Faculty and Chairman of the UK Regional Representatives for Addictions Psychiatry
An addictions specialist who is a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners (with Distinction) and who is a Master of Science in Addictions (with Distinction, Imperial College, London)
A clinical biochemist who is a Master of Science, a Doctor of Philosophy and co-inventor of the Zenamed Treatment system.
A Brief History...
The inspiration for the foundation of ZenaMed came from many years of clinical experience seeing alcohol dependent people repeatedly relapsing after treatment. These patients needed a high level of support and monitoring, as well as medication to help them stay free of alcohol and able to live a normal life.
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Disulfiram is a medicine that produces an unpleasant physical reaction if alcohol is consumed and so deters people from drinking. Without supervision the drug is not taken regularly and is not a very effective treatment. However, when supervised to make sure it is taken every day disulfiram has powerful benefits. In fact, supervised disulfiram has been shown to be significantly more effective than other medicines such as acamprosate, naltrexone and topiramate (Skinner et al, 2014), and can also be combined with these other drugs to help reduce the desire to drink.
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A major study in Germany (OLITA programme, Krampe, 2007) used supervised disulfiram plus high intensity support from a clinical team. This programme kept 52% of severely alcohol dependent people free of relapse for 9 years, and 26% of them didn’t touch a drop of alcohol over that period of time! But high intensity support from a clinical team is expensive and impractical and not sustainable in everyday clinical practice.
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In order to combine the benefits of all of the effective components of good treatment, we developed ZenaMed’s Treatment System. Our research demonstrated that both disulfiram and alcohol can be accurately measured on a sample of breath with a hand held instrument, (Fletcher et al, 2006). ZenaMed developed the technology so that we could support and monitor a person remotely – at home or at work, in fact anywhere in the world where there was an internet connection. We tested it out in clinical practice and were delighted with the results (Fletcher, 2015)!