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Open Imaging Index
MRI SPECT / nuclear medicine Brain

EXALT exenatide trial in alcohol use disorder

Exenatide once weekly for alcohol use disorder investigated in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial

Brain fMRI, structural MRI and dopamine transporter SPECT from a Copenhagen trial of weekly exenatide versus placebo in alcohol use disorder, scanned at baseline and week 26, with healthy controls. Imaging on request; clinical tables are open under CC BY 4.0.

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Overview

EXALT was a 26-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial run at four alcohol outpatient clinics in Copenhagen, Denmark, testing whether the GLP-1 receptor agonist exenatide (2 mg once weekly) lowers drinking in treatment-seeking adults with alcohol use disorder. Of 127 enrolled patients, a subgroup had brain fMRI and dopamine transporter SPECT before randomization and again after treatment. The clinical tables are open on Mendeley Data under CC BY 4.0, but the raw images are held back and offered only on request to the corresponding authors.

Composition

The fMRI substudy reports 61 patients at baseline (33 placebo, 28 exenatide; 36 men; mean age 50.2) and 25 healthy controls matched for sex, age and education (15 men; mean age 49.3). Patients were 18 to 70 years old and met DSM-5 alcohol use disorder and ICD-10 alcohol dependence criteria. The fMRI group analyses at week 26 include 33 patients (16 placebo, 17 exenatide). For SPECT there were 46 baseline scans, one excluded for technical issues, plus 16 per-protocol and 5 premature rescans; every SPECT patient also took part in the fMRI substudy. A further 21 SPECT controls came from earlier studies and are not part of this trial.

Acquisition

MRI ran on a 3 T Siemens Prisma with a 64-channel head coil at Rigshospitalet: localizer, T1-weighted structural image (0.9 mm slices), B0 field map, resting-state BOLD and two task runs, an alcohol cue-reactivity task (357 volumes) and a spatial N-back working memory task (230 volumes), with TR 2 s and TE 30 ms. Controls were scanned once. SPECT used about 185 MBq of [123I]FP-CIT and a triple-head Philips IRIX camera, acquiring six 10-minute frames between 180 and 240 minutes after injection, with cerebellum as reference region for striatal binding potential.

Known limitations

  • The images have no public download, license or published access terms; access depends on approval by the authors.
  • Many patients left the trial early (69 of 127), so few have both baseline and week-26 scans.
  • Single scanner and single SPECT camera at one hospital.
  • Patients were all White and recruited in one city.
  • The paper and the CONSORT figure legend disagree on which arm received 62 and which 65 patients.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 86 subjects.

Sex

  • Female 35 41%
  • Male 51 59%

Appendix 1 Table 17 in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, supplemental appendices 1 (fMRI) and 2 (SPECT)

Contrast / sequence

Groups can overlap

  • T1-weighted 86 100%
  • BOLD fMRI 86 100%

Appendix 1 fMRI acquisition in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, supplemental appendices 1 (fMRI) and 2 (SPECT)

Condition

Groups can overlap

  • Alcohol use disorder 61 71%
    Age mean 50.2
  • Healthy control 25 29%
    Age mean 49.3

Appendix 1 Table 17 in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, supplemental appendices 1 (fMRI) and 2 (SPECT)

Country

  • Denmark 86 100%

Methods in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, Exenatide once weekly for alcohol use disorder (PMC9675448)

Modality

  • MRI 86 100%
  • SPECT / nuclear medicine 45 52%

Appendix 1 fMRI acquisition, Appendix 2 SPECT results in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, supplemental appendices 1 (fMRI) and 2 (SPECT)

PET tracer

  • [123I]ioflupane 45 52%

Appendix 2 SPECT results in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, supplemental appendices 1 (fMRI) and 2 (SPECT)

Scanner vendor

  • Siemens Healthineers 86 100%
  • Philips 45 52%

Appendix 1 fMRI acquisition, Appendix 2 SPECT equipment in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, supplemental appendices 1 (fMRI) and 2 (SPECT)

Field strength

  • 3 T 86 100%

Appendix 1 fMRI acquisition in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, supplemental appendices 1 (fMRI) and 2 (SPECT)

Condition by sex

Reported cross table. A dot marks a cell the source does not give.

Male
Alcohol use disorder36
Healthy control15

Appendix 1 Table 17 in Klausen et al. 2022, JCI Insight, supplemental appendices 1 (fMRI) and 2 (SPECT)

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
On request

Ask the authors or the data holder. No published process or terms, and access is at their discretion

Raw fMRI and SPECT data are not on Mendeley Data. Requests go to the corresponding authors with a methodologically sound proposal; requestors may have to sign a data access agreement whose terms are not published. The paper states the data stay available for 5 years. Clinical, questionnaire and blood test tables are an open download.

Access page

Different parts of the data carry different licenses. The summary on the right shows the most restrictive answer per rule.

For Brain imaging (fMRI with structural MRI, and DAT SPECT), shared on request only.

No published license or data use terms

The data holder has published no license and no data use terms. Any use, sharing or commercial right has to be agreed with the data holder, and nothing can be assumed to be allowed. Default copyright and data protection law still apply.

Original license text Checked 2026-10-08

What you can do

  • Commercial use Not stated
  • Not stated
  • Train ML models Not stated
  • Create derived data Not stated
  • Publish results Not stated

What you can share

  • Share the data Not stated
  • Share derived data Not stated
  • Share trained models Not stated

What you must do

  • Cite or credit Not stated
  • Share alike Not stated
  • Sign an agreement Not stated
  • Ethics approval Not stated
  • Manuscript review Not stated
  • Release code Not stated
  • Return results Not stated
  • Delete after use Not stated

Limits

  • No re-identification Not stated
  • Location limits Not stated
For Clinical, questionnaire, blood test and dropout tables, the protocol and the analysis plan on Mendeley Data.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Use, share and adapt the data for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you credit the creators.

Original license text Version read: 4.0 Checked 2026-10-07

What you can do

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you can share

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you must do

  • Yes
  • Share alike No
  • No
  • No
  • Manuscript review No
  • Release code No
  • Return results No
  • Delete after use No

Limits

  • No
  • Location limits No

Citation

Klausen MK, Jensen ME, Møller M, et al. Exenatide once weekly for alcohol use disorder investigated in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial. JCI Insight 7(19):e159863 (2022). doi:10.1172/jci.insight.159863

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.