Posted by Quintal on November 30, 2006, at 19:36:52
In reply to Re: Lamictal and cognitive / memory side effects » Quintal, posted by clint878 on November 30, 2006, at 18:51:13
Well I accept that possibility clint, although I was actually thinking the opposite might be the case - as you say, that your perceived cognitive benefits may be due to symptoms of the underlying disorder being resolved. I've never had a problem like that with antidepressants or any other drug that I recall. Now that I think more carefully about it I recall that words on a page would seem to rearrange themselves so that I'd have to go back and read them two or three times to understand them properly, and by then of course I had forgotten the meaning of the whole sentence. So there was no point in even thinking about trying to read a book..............
Almost as if lamotrigine were causing temporary dyslexia.
This was no real problem for me, but imagine somebody working as say a secretary and the difficulty it could cause them. That's why I think word-finding difficulty should be recognised and included in the patient information leaflet, since it is a frequent complaint of people being treated with lamotrigine, even if it is as you suggest a sign that the mood disorder is beginning to stabilize.
I'm puzzled by the resistance. As with all medications I accept that some people escape common side effects, or even receive benefits in areas where others are impaired (I found cognitive enhancement with benzos at low doses contrary to expert opinion), but there are few things more annoying in psychiatry than suffering some troubling side effect and having it discounted.
As far as research is concerned, a brief Google seemed to be turning up "lamotrigine seems no more likely to cause word-finding difficulties than other anticonvulsants". Thereby implying lamotrigine does indeed cause this problem but is no worse than the others. The last time I checked word-finding difficulties could be quite severe with other anticonvulsants.
Q
poster:Quintal
thread:708905
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20061129/msgs/709145.html