Posted by larryhoover on June 14, 2011, at 17:54:27
In reply to Re: i developed a new tic or TD, posted by Christ_empowered on June 3, 2011, at 12:11:40
> That said, the more I read on the subject the more it seems that there's a whole range of tardive stuff that psychiatry either doesn't acknowledge or is only beginning to acknowledge. Tardive tics, tardive psychosis, tardive akathisia...
I hesitate to bring this subject up again, as it has brought about intense debate in the past, but movement disorders are part of the symptom cluster of untreated schizophrenia, very crudely matching incidence (%) with age minus 20 (years). As such, it is extremely difficult to extract the confounding impact of neuroleptic medication from what would otherwise be the natural progression of the psychiatric disorder. An earlier post on the subject: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20051126/msgs/583327.html
According to this recent study, anti-psychotic medication improved the situation for otherwise drug-naive first episode subjects. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20222137
It is clear that neuroleptic medication can place focussed physiological stress on the motor-control regions of the brain, and I'm not trying to absolve meds of this burden. I would suggest, instead, that the motor defects that accompany schizophrenia during its natural development are manifestations of a diathesis (vulnerability), and that the meds can provoke the development of movement disorders via stressing this vulnerability, probably including some individuals who would not otherwise have developed these symptoms. Moreover, naturalistic observation of medication-naive schizophrenics indicates that movement-disorder symptoms do naturally ebb and flow (see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12151284?dopt=Abstract ), whereas medication-induced symptoms may be permanent.
Lar
poster:larryhoover
thread:986773
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20110610/msgs/988101.html