Posted by SLS on March 18, 2014, at 19:42:19
In reply to TCAs, sodium channel blocking, posted by tom2228 on March 18, 2014, at 10:55:15
You have a large amount of knowledge, and you use it well to come up with theories. I really don't know if there is anything I can contribute other than to say that we still don't know everything that these drugs do and how they might work to improve a condition that we know too little about.
I am not telling you to throw your hands up in the air and enter a blind trial-and-error approach. I am saying that I would not overlook or exclude a drug from consideration without some compelling clinical findings. For example, I would not eliminate desipramine from your list of things to try if you failed to respond to nortriptyline. I really don't care to propose a pharmacological explanation for this right now. I just know that the doctors that I have seen over the years have described this phenomenon as being their clinical experience with these two drugs when treating real people.
TCAs are L-type calcium channel blockers. Nimodipine and verapamil have been studied as mood stabilizers and antidepressant augmenters. Reports of success using these drugs are sparse. The NIMH really, really wanted nimodipine to work. It didn't. Perhaps it helps for depression caused by cerebral vascular insufficiency. I don't know to what extent CCB contributes to the therapeutic activity of TCA. I would doubt that it does at all, but I can't be certain.
- Scott
Some see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1062693
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20140307/msgs/1062743.html