Posted by desolationrower on November 13, 2008, at 9:24:38
In reply to Abilify to Help with Depression?, posted by BRC on November 13, 2008, at 5:39:29
> Hi,
>
> I saw a commercial last night for Abilify. This ad stated that if your depression medicaion wasn't working that Abilify could help impove your symptoms.
>
> I have two questions? (1) I thought Abilify was anti-psychotic and Bi-Polor med.Hi, yes antipsychotics sort of make everything less salient and so help with mania and psychosis and sometimes anxieties. They are also sometimes used for augmenting antidepressants. I know that pych. meds are widely prescribed to treat problems that the drug otherwise was intended for.
>(2) Is Abilify in the same class of meds as Zyprexa, Geodon, etc? Does it work primarily on dopamine? Does it carry the same potentially damaging physical side effects as the other anti-psychotics.
>Yes, they are all atypical antipsychotics. However they are all a bit different, even more so than the SRIs. Aripiprazole works as a dopamine partial agonist, which means it doesn't ocmpletely block it they way other antipsychotics do. It is also not quite as strong blocking serotonin 2a. It has less weight gain or sexual problems than most antipsychotics. if you go to this page and scroll down there is a chart of the side effects. Any antispychotic can cause tardive diskinesia (odd uncontrolable movements - the "thorazine shuffle") although sometimes it goes away and the newer medicines have much lower risk.
> I ask these questions b/c I meet for the second time with my new pdoc next week. I have pretty bad OCD intrusive thoughts and was told at one time that small doses of some anti-psychotic meds may help. But seeing a lot of patients taking anti-psychotics having tremors, tics, etc. I was scared to even try. But does Abilify usually cause these problems?
>
> Sorry for all the questions :).
>
> BRC
>Yes, sometimes they help with OCD, at least when they augment an SRI - i assume you are on something like paroxitine or clomipramine right now and it isn't doing the job? Arpiprazole is newer so there haven't been any studies i'm aware of, just some case reports that it helps OCD. Personally i dislike the antipsychotics and think they should be more of a lst resort, trying even things that don't have as much evidence because the risk of some side effects increases with time so long-term use is a bit scary, so personally i'd rather give lower risk things a try before settling on an antipsychotic. Still, the side effect risk isn't as high as if you needed a high dose like for schizophrenia.
-d/r
poster:desolationrower
thread:862757
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20081106/msgs/862781.html