Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

New measures are being explored to help individuals with bipolar disorder, also known as manic major depression, to cope with their crushing illness. Surprising choices are becoming tested as possible treatments for this disorder, this kind of as motion sickness spots, a medication used to deal with Lou Gehrig's disease and a device that produces an electrical field around the brain.
<br />
Bipolar disorder is a complex and strange illness characterized by severe changes in mood, from pallino to depression. A sufferer may experience intervals of increased energy, over-activity, irritability and often delusions during the manic stage, and low mood, reduced concentration, disturbed sleep and ideas of self-harm during the depressed condition. This condition can ruin careers and divided marriages apart. Extreme cases of major depression can even drive desperate people to commit committing suicide.
<br />
In spite of years of research, researchers have got yet to build up a medicine specifically for zweipolig disorder. Anti-depression medicines presently sold in the marketplace do lessen symptoms, but often flunk of finish treatment.
<br />
Nothing is certain regarding the latest batch of feasible treatments which includes even the cancer of the breast drug tamoxifen. Approaches had been identified by logic, and more by natural chance. However , scientists already have early evidence that someday these remedies may demonstrate useful against bipolar disorder.
<br />
Individuals having episodes of mania may experience periods of boosted energy and restlessness that may run for any week or even more, resulting to sleeplessness as well as intense irritability. In this episode, a person may exhibit unusual behavior, this kind of as trend and promiscuity.
<br />
On the other hand, shows of depressive disorder characterizes the other face of the bipolar coin, a period of boredom, sleepiness and lack of energy, which may last a week or more. Again, actually thoughts of suicide may enter the picture.
<br />
Current bipolar treatments include a variety of drugs which includes lithium and other anticonvulsant and antipsychotic medications that can stabilize disposition. Psychological therapy and patient education significantly boost the performance of these medications.
<br />
What makes bipolar disorder harder to treat is definitely that its depressive shows are more severe and more resistant to therapy than normal unipolar major depression. Some current bipolar medications have unwanted effects including weight gain, sleepiness, tingling, and the feeling of feeling drugged.
<br />
As with the case of lithium, the newest batch of possible treatments for zweipolig disorder have got revealed their particular potential just by chance. Take the experience of National Start of Mental Health researchers Maura Furey and Doctor Wayne Drevets with the drug scopolamine, which is normally utilized to keep people from getting seasick or carsick. If they were learning whether scopolamine could improve memory and attention in depressed people, they observed an odd factor as the patients started feeling much less depressed the night after the injections, a remarkable thing since most antidepressants consider weeks to kick in.
<br />
In October 2006, after Drevets and Furey changed their particular research focus to test the drug's effect on depression by itself, they published an motivating, though primary, result using a small group of depressed patients, some of whom had been diagnosed bipolar disorder.
<br />
Furey is now leading research using scopolamine skin areas --- like those that travelers wear to prevent motion sickness --- to deal with depression in bipolar disorder as well as common depression. For now, people ought not to try patch treatment pertaining to depression on their own, she stated.
<br />
A similar incident happened in McLean Medical center in Belmont, Mass., in 2001 when depressed zweipolig patients who had been getting their particular brains scanned for a study on brain chemistry instantly felt a lot better. And in 2005, they released their bottom line that the electric powered fields created by the brain tests might help lift depression.
<br />
Although not everything is being based on fortune. Apart from luck, researchers have taken advantage of the few information they have into bipolar disease to build up potential remedies. Scientists the real key to unlocking the mysteries of bipolar disorder - and thereby open the way to get the development of new drugs -- lies in a brand new generation of research in to DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acidity, which could remain the key to discovering a highly effective treatment pertaining to bipolar disorder.