Posted by med_empowered on September 21, 2008, at 20:20:29
In reply to Re: Side Effects (specifically Abilify), posted by Kimbersaur on September 21, 2008, at 20:00:54
hey. The thing about antipsychotics for ocd-type symptoms is...its not really a sure-fire deal. Sometimes symptoms get better or more tolerable; other times, antipsychotics can make OCD worse (or actually induce OCD--its happened with zyprexa, apparently).
How much worse are you thoughts now versus before abilify or early on during abilify treatment? Abilify makes some people more agitated than they were before treatment--in addition to akathisia, the partial dopamine agonism seems to make some people crazy.
Have you tried other meds, like benzos, stimulants, TCAs, etc.? I'm just asking because antipsychotics aren't really first line for OCD-type probs, and there are lots of meds out there that are safer, cheaper, and have more data behind them. There's also talk therapy and self-help and nutritional methods that you could explore.
One thought...I think Abilify takes about 2 weeks to reach a steady state in the blood stream; the effects you see after that time might be a better indication of how Abilify is going to work for you than the very early part of treatment. Also, if you're a slow metabolizer, your low abilify dose could be building up (thanks to the long half life of abilify)..there are a couple reports online of people getting toxic blood levels of abilify off of therapeutic doses b/c of slow drug metabolism......
apparently, since abilify is relatively free of EPS and other obvious side effects usually associated with antipsychotics, you can get high blood levels and not even know it.
Good luck!
poster:med_empowered
thread:853283
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080915/msgs/853315.html