Posted by linkadge on September 23, 2006, at 9:25:11
In reply to Re: Nicotine works :s » linkadge, posted by SLS on September 21, 2006, at 18:29:25
>Over the last 5 years, I have spent time around >perhaps 200 actively smoking people diagnosed >with depression in an outpatient partial >hospitalization program. These people smoke 2-3 >packs a day regardless of their mood state. The >only things that get these people well are >standard psychopharmacology and psychological >support. No amount of smoking seems to help.
I've seen handfulls of people who have been taking antidepressants and still seem very depressed. They know that the drugs do *something*, but they just havn't found drugs that are sufficiant.
They're people like you for instance, You're on a number of medications that you know help *some*, but they're not fully cutting the mustard. To the untrained eye, they appear to be doing nothing (am i right?) but that doesn't mean we dismiss the agents.
>I guess one could argue that they could have >been more severely depressed without smoking or >that they were not getting enough nicotine.
For some people, nicotine may not be a direct antidepressant, but it could have other properties which are in some way helping the mood disorder. For instance, pychiatric patients who smoke do not have the upregulated postsynaptic 5-ht1a receptors that nonsmoking depressives have.
The drug may be acting like buspar, which is not a powerful antidepressant, but can relieve some of the symptoms of depression.>Where did you see the word "addictive" in my post?
I just assumed that you must have seen some inherent evil in nicotine in order to be discouraging people from trying it.
>I think that one bad study got good results. No >big deal. They reported what they found. I don't >think we are going to find dozens of clinical >trials of nicotine as an antidepressant to >compare it to.I think there could be a growing number of them. There is talk about developing nicotine like drugs for depressive/smoking/adhd disorder, if so, companies might want to know beforehand, on just how nicotine affects these populations.
>What matters is whether or not the stuff works >robustly and persistently.I agree, I think we just need the studies to show either way.
Like any other antidepressant, I don't think it will work for every depression.
Linkadge
poster:linkadge
thread:687688
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060919/msgs/688400.html