One of the big concerns about the use of antipsychotic medication has been weight gain, and with it the associated increase in diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. This metabolic syndrome is thought to be decreasing the life expectancy of the serious mentally ill, which is already poor — they are about twice as likely to die of cardiovascular disease and four times as likely to die of respiratory disease,
The newer antipsychotics have been accused of worsening this. But a recent pharmaco-epidemiological study suggests that they may (a) not be the same and (b) the more “atypical” and obseso-genic the medication, the lower the death rate may be.
Which demonstrates yet, again, that if you think you have the answer you better do the research to confirm it: or that one should only trust those who bring data.
Not surprising that standard assumptions would badly confuse the cause & effect aspects of Weight Gain, Food Desire and Mental Disorders. From a purely biochemical point of view, Mental Disorders are, in some form, either a lack of receptor agonism or a lack of antagonism. (More likely both at once, in different regions of the brain and along different receptor lines)
Once the body is into a low-level version of nervous system shock, the body will leech desperately from whatever low-return source responds to the signalling, in a vain attempt to establish a functional homeostasis. We don’t have much issue understanding that the body will do this if its protein deficient, working through muscle and into organs (and thus permanent organ damage), but the instant the Brain is involved, it feels like most doctors & researchers start deactivating theirs. Yes, it’s highly complex in the functional details, but the basic systematic aspects are still the same. Mostly as without electro-chemical homeostasis in nerves, they blow up very quickly and you’re very dead.
In this instance, though, it’d take some very deep study of the cell-receptor changes along the cardio-vascular system. Given the likely desired candidates that the nervous system would be after (phospholipids) are most easily scavenged from the vascular track, that would be a very good place to start looking. But that requires cadaver study and it’d require some pretty slick work to pull off an animal model. Though I imagine it’s possible.
I’m going to guess this is the most technical comment you’ve ever gotten, but I’m curious if you got my e-mail.
I can’t find your email
On your point, let’s say that the antipodean psychiatrists have looked at antioxidants such as fish oil or N-acetyl cystiene, or even nitroprusside to augment treatment. The current theory is that cortisol triggers glia to destroy synapses, and this synatic destruction is not that genetically driven. (current models have Schizophrenia as 30% genetic. Diabetes has a higher weighting)..You need to stop this process and allow synaptic repair, which requires BDNF, and it appears that most powerful antioxidants can do this.
My local team have some ideas, but one talks of results, not hypotheses. All the compounds above have at least open label trials showing that they work.
Technical posts are rare here simply because I generally don’t do work on the blog
Hrmm… I sent it from my yahoo account to pukeko with the corrected non-letter characters, no attachments or anything that spam assassin should have triggered on. Could you check the spam folder for me? I had a question I’m quite sure you’re the person to ask it of. If it’s not there, I’ll change the title and resend it.
As for the research area, it’s not too surprising that the adjunctive treatments help. The Brain is the largest user of Energy in the body, so addressing core system problems always frees up the body to handle the main problem it has. Assuming the problem hasn’t reached beyond the body’s capacity for self-repair. If it’s at that point, that gets a lot more complicated.
Granted, the real problem if figuring out what core systems are effected by the mental disorder, which changes what needs to be done for the patient. There’s never a “one-size fits all” solution, a problem that’s plagued medicine for so very long.
I’m now home where I can look into pukeko at pukeko etc. The trouble is that I junk spam automatically — it does not get off the server and spam assassin is set at max. I think that kills every yahoo email address in the known universe, by the way.
What I’ve done is changed the advice on the contact page to my gmail account: I can get at the spam there. Try pukeko60 [at] gmail.com: that should work.
Sent. I can understand why there’d be heavy filtering on Yahoo accounts, but no links, pictures or anything that should set it off. That’s pretty much an Whitelist system with Yahoo accounts, hehe.
Check your email.
Got it. Check your email.
Looking Glass, you’d be interested in the recent Japanese schizophrenia research. The Japanese research theorizes that schizophrenia is the result of an infection triggering neuroinflammation, which screws up the brain’s receptors/signals. The article proposed that tetracycline antibiotics could work as well as antipsychotics.
Hmmm, the antipodeans are arguing about antioxidants, including NSAIDs.