Posted by Eddie Sylvano on October 8, 2003, at 18:28:28
In reply to Re: Creativity:psychosis:emotion revisited, posted by Dinah on October 8, 2003, at 12:03:04
> It also made me wonder about antipsychotics. As major tranquilizers, do they work by raising the latent inhibition? I've always wondered how what worked very effectively as a major tranquilizer also managed the symptoms of psychosis.
--------I've never read a decent treatment of the biological underpinnings of psychosis. It's so varied. There's senile dementia, schizophrenia, depressive psychotic fugues, drug-induced psychosis, etc. The antipsychotics are dopamine (D2) receptor antagonists, so the pharmaceutical industry seems to buy the dopamine dysregulation gambit. Schizophrenia is odd too, in that it expresses postive and negative symptoms. It seems to me that research into Alzheimer's might be the most fruitful route. There'a a neat drug called memantine that works by softening neuronal sensitivity to glutamate, and works well in a lot of dementia cases. Glutamate is an excitatory messenger that causes neurons to depolarize, and thus fire. It would seem that in dementia patients, there is a dysregulation of either the amount of, or the response to glutamate. All this rapid firing eventually degrades the neurons ability to function correctly, and so the brain's functioning deteriorates. More simply, memantine calms down the brain's activity, acting like (as you mentioned) a tranquilizer.
The whole system is pretty complex and crazy. Theorizing the big picture is a lot easier than practicing informed pharmacology.
poster:Eddie Sylvano
thread:266751
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20031002/msgs/266901.html