I would be very interested to hear from each of you what specific brain receptor malfunctions your psych doctor has analyzed that you have and how that is supported by the meds you’re taking specifying what receptors those meds affect and to what extent. I understand that it’s much more complicated than this, but I think it’s good to at least have some foundational understanding of what’s going on.
My brother primarily has receptor malfunctions D2 and 5-HT2A. He likely has some minor D1 and other 5-HT issues. He’s extra sensitive to alpha1 which makes him sleep all day and act like a zombie. alpha2 helps decrease alpha1 symptoms.
He’s presently on Latuda for D2 and 5-HT2A; Zyprexa for D1 and D2; and Seroquel for 5-HT2A. Of course these meds cover more receptors, but these are the receptors these meds are primarily helping my brother with. All of these are somewhat helpful in decreasing his symptoms, but none of them help him enough to enable him to be functional or stay out of the mental hospital.
I’ve read the D receptors primarily cause positive symptoms of paranoia, hallucinations & delusions
I’ve read the 5-HT receptors primarily cause mood disorders of depression, OCD, anxiety, and mania
I’ve read that some think D1 or D2 are responsible for negative symptoms, but others think one of the 5HT2 are responsible. What’s your experience?
I’ve read D1 might be responsible for cognitive symptoms. What’s you’re experience?
All I’ve ever seen and heard of is psych doctors “randomly” throwing meds at sz patients and when they don’t work then randomly trying another one. I assume at least some of you have a good psych doctor performing at least a minimal amount of scientific analysis. Because people are different one med might help one person more in one area and another person more in another.
Please share your experience and details to help educate the rest of us.
Thanks
I’m sure a number of you think that the scientific analysis of this is garbage and worthless, and that’s fine.
@kristina, you are correct. It is/was believed that your primary sz is in the frontal lobe which is why labotomies were performed on people with sz primarily in the '50s, but results of those labotomies were all over the map, and I don’t know if it was later verified by other studies.
Abilify primarily affects D1, 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A with some D3, D4, 5-HT2C, and 5-HT7 with some alpha1 and H1.
Abilify is unusual in that is tends to self adjust in some of these areas so you never know quite what you’re going to get.
So @kristina please tell us what symptoms you have had and how well Abilify helps to relieve those symptoms.
@crimby The science is that well developed. There are online reports for most APs detailing what they do and what areas of the brain they affect and to what degree.
I was hoping some psych doctors not only did the analysis, but actually talked to their patients about it; however, that’s probably asking too much.
So I should change this request to the following which should probably be more helpful to everyone:
Everyone, please tell us what symptoms you have had, what meds you are taking and how much, and how well those meds are working for you - specifically which symptoms your meds are relieving and to what degree.
Thanks
All of my positive symptoms are almost completely gone with meds. My mood swings are barely noticeable. I have very few side-effects. I am on 10 mg Zyprexa and 600 mg Seroquel but I am going to ask my doctor if I can quit the Seroquel. Will probably have to increase my Zyprexa though.
That’s fantastic! Zyprexa and Seroquel do two very different things. Zyprexa is primarily for helping your positive symptoms and Seroquel for the mood swings. Increasing Zyprexa won’t compensate for dropping Seroquel so your doctor probably won’t go for it.
So what positive symptoms did you have, hallucinations or what, and what type of mood swings did you have, depression or what? Do you or did you have issues with OCD?
I still want to try. I think I’ll be fine on just the Zyprexa. My mood swings might have been related to the psychosis, IDK. I feel Zyprexa helps with the mood swings too.
My hallucinations were mostly mild, but they were 24/7. Lots of flying dots and shapes, things vibrating or moving around, shadow people and such. My delusions were about me having special powers. I believed I could predict the future, that I received special insight from spirits or god(s) and was meant to share this with the world, kind of like a prophet only less religious. Stuff like that. I also had mostly mild paranoia like thinking my friends were trying to sabotage me or that my therapist was out to get me. I got depressions and hypomania and mixed episodes. Mostly mixed or hypomanic but deep depressions too. I don’t have OCD issues.
@prnoidschiz u look like notmoses to me…
i am currently on 7.5 mg zyprexa…
my symptoms are flat effect and lack of motivation…
which medicine can u suggest to me…
i would be happy to hear from u…
take care…
@anon9798425 Although it’s not the primary use of Zyprexa, it still does have some Serotonin effect so you might be right. It doesn’t hurt to try as long as you do it very slowly. Dropping Zyprexa more than 5mg in 3 days can have some nasty side effects depending on how sensitive you are to it. Thanks for sharing your info!
Hi @far_cry0 !
I’m not a doctor, so I don’t suggest meds for people. The purpose of this post is to try to share information to help educate all of us.
7.5mg of Zyprexa is a seriously small amount. Since you only have negative symptoms I’d be curious to know if the Zyprexa is doing anything for you. Per my original post it’s believed negative symptoms are primarily from Dopamine, but there might be a Serotonin factor. So your information would be very helpful to my knowledge. So don’t just tell me if the small amount of Zyprexa is doing anything for you, but have you ever been on any other meds, how much, and did they do anything for you?
Although I won’t suggest meds, we can talk about what is known to help negative symptoms in sz.
Thanks!
To play along- paranoia,weird thoughts(delusional?),loud intrusive “thoughts” , low drive and motivation, social interaction/skills deficits , anxiety(genera and social) ,mood symptoms,some cognitive issues that may or may not be psychiatrically related.
On risperdal consta . It helps much more with the paranoia and intrusive/weird thoughts than it does with the drive and motivation. It makes little difference cognitively.
So you have positive, negative, and possibly cognitive symptoms.
Risperdal helps primarily with D2 and 5-HT2. So the D2 is probably helping with the paranoia, and the 5-HT2 with the anxiety/mood. At least for you, Risperdal isn’t helping with the negative symptoms possibly because it isn’t working with D1 or might not be the right combination of 5-HT or both.
There might be another med out there that will help you with the negative symptoms.
Thanks for the info!
I haven’t run across a med yet that helps with cognitive symptoms. Has anyone else?
Most of the info I’ve read online says most of the meds out there are primarily only helping positive symptoms. However, meds on occasion have helped with some negative symptoms, and you do have Sarcosine which helps both positive and negative symptoms.
Is there anything else available that helps with negative or cognitive symptoms that anyone can think of?
That is very much what my nurse practitioner said. Re mood I think the consta has made some difference. With the anxiety I seem to be more pervasively anxious since being on the consta.
How do they figure out what receptors specifically are malfunctioning? From what I’ve heard they only have theories about what receptors are wonky based on what you’re diagnosed with but I’ve never heard of them knowing exactly which receptors are weird, it’s more of the “give them meds until you find something that works” game that you talked about.
They do very controlled experiments on animals shooting them up with drugs to see how the brain receptors respond. They give full details of how which med affects which receptors and how much. So the issue is never which receptors or how much is the med going to affect you. The issue is what receptor malfunctions do you have and how much is the med going to help compensate for those malfunctions. If you have a particular receptor malfunction and the analysis of the med shows that it doesn’t work at all on that receptor, then the med probably won’t help you. Of course it’s more complicated than that, we’re talking about your brain here, but these are basic foundational concepts of sz that we have scientific study to give us an idea of what’s going on.
Very interesting, I’d love to know more about this. Since Zoloft has been effective for me I wonder which receptor malfunction that is…I haven’t been on antipsychotics long enough to know if Abilify is actually helping me or not.
