Posted by jay on July 21, 2002, at 19:32:23
Well..yesterday I was in a horrible "hypomanic" state..very irritable, edgy, angry..etc. I have no mood stabilizers around, and don't see pdoc until next week. I suddenly remembered something that help me to quickly "break" my manic 'spell', at least for a short time. Again, I *don't* endorse this..YMMV...etc..so please, no letters about my 'bad' advice, etc. After all, there is some scientific basis for this. Anyhow, I popped a 3mg Melatonin pill. Within an hour..I was calm, quiet, and ready to sleep, which I did, and woke up feeling fine. Here are a couple of abstracts to back up a *little* of my experiment...Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry 2000 Feb;24(2):185-
Melatonin add-on in manic patients with treatment resistant insomnia.
Bersani G, Garavini A.
Department of Psychiatric Science and Psychological Medicine, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy. bersani@axrma.uniroma.it
1. A profound alteration of circadian rhythm of sleep is often a central feature in manic syndrome. Melatonin (MLT) is a main synchronizer of the sleep/wake cycle, playing a role of transduction to brain functioning of informations about periodical environmental changes, i.e. the duration of daylength. 2. In several sleep phase disorders, MLT exerts a therapeutic effect, by normalizing the sleep/wake cycle. 3. Eleven patients, 8 males and 3 females, aged 22-43, meeting DSM IV diagnostic criteria for Bipolar Disorder, Manic Type, were selected for the presence of insomnia not responding to usual hypnotic therapies (benzodiazepine). 4. All the patients were on antimanic treatment. MLT 3 mg per os was administrated at 22.30 h for 1 month, without changing the previous antimanic and hypnotic treatments. All patients showed a significantly longer duration of sleep following MLT add-on. The severity of mania showed a parallel significant decrease. 5. The results of this pilot clinical study suggest that MLT add-on can be useful in antimanic therapy to treat resistant circadian sleep alterations as well as consequently exert a global therapeutic action on the manic state.
Publication Types:
Clinical TrialPMID: 10800742 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
----
Med Hypotheses 2000 Jan;54(1):26-9A preliminary understanding of mania: roles for melatonin, vasotocin and rapid-eye-movement sleep.
Maurizi CP.
Department of Pathology, Houston Medical Center, Warner Robins, GA 31093, USA. maurizicp@aol.com
Speculation about mania links melatonin, vasotocin and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. Normal REM sleep can have the loss of reality testing and this feature intruding into the wake period could be the cause of the distorted reality present in manic delusions. REM sleep has a role in memory formation. Abnormal levels and/or rhythms of melatonin are thought to be involved in mania. Decreased melatonin production with malfunction of REM sleep is proposed to be a cause of sudden infant death syndrome and Alzheimer's disease, because the loss of the antioxidant function of melatonin allows brain injury to occur.
PMID: 10790719 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
---
poster:jay
thread:113197
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020718/msgs/113197.html