Psychotropic drug

About: Psychotropic drug is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2309 publications have been published within this topic receiving 54070 citations.

Wasting pig syndrome (WPS) in weaners — treatment with amperozide

Abstract: Social and environmental stressors during the critical period of weaning frequently affect not only performance but also the health status of piglets. Pigs unable to cope with the changes associated with weaning develop a condition characterized by slowing of growth and a listless or unthrifty appearance, known as the wasting pig syndrome (WPS). In the present investigation a total of 100 4-week-old wasting pigs were studied. The pigs were divided randomly into 10 pens (10 animals per pen). Half the number of pigs were treated orally with amperozide (2.5 mg/kg body-weight), a psychotropic drug shown to modify emotional behaviour in response to social stress. Control groups were treated with long-acting oxytetracycline and vitamins (A + D3 + E). There were significant improvements in average daily weight gain (P less than 0.05) and feed conversion ratio (P less than 0.01) in amperozide-treated pigs compared with controls. Furthermore, there was a significant reduction (P less than 0.05) in mortality in amperozide treated groups. Within 2 weeks following amperozide treatment the clinical signs of the WPS had disappeared and the pigs grew at the same rate as normal healthy pigs.

Effect of psychotropic drugs on excitatory amino acids in patients undergoing psychosurgery for depression.

Abstract: Samples of ventricular CSF were taken from 52 consecutive patients admitted for psychosurgery for intractable depression. Concentrations of asparagine, aspartate, glutamine, glutamic acid, and serine were determined. Glutamate and aspartate concentrations, implicated in excitotoxic brain damage, were not affected by various types of psychotropic drug treatment. Serine, a modulator of glutamate responses, was significantly elevated in samples from subjects receiving antidepressants. These subjects responded poorly to the operation. Psychotropic drugs are unlikely to be neurotoxic. Nevertheless, antidepressants may influence excitatory neurotransmission.

Factors associated with deaths from suicide in a French nationwide HIV-infected cohort.

Abstract: OBJECTIVES: People living with HIV (PLHIV) are at a higher risk of dying by suicide than the general population. Epidemiological data regarding determinants of suicide in PLHIV are scarce. The aim of this study was thus to study demographic, socio-economic, psychiatric history and immunovirological characteristics associated with death from suicide in the French multicenter Dat'AIDS cohort, from January 2000 to July 2013. METHODS: This was a nested case-control study. All deceased PLHIV during the study period who died by suicide and whose medical files could be checked were included as cases. Controls were selected using incidence density sampling. For each case, up to four controls were selected among all actively followed PLHIV at the index date (date of death of cases). Controls were matched for time from HIV diagnosis (5-year periods) and clinical centre. RESULTS: Seventy cases and 279 controls were included in the study. By multivariable analysis, the factors significantly associated with death from suicide were: not having children, active or substituted drug consumption, alcohol intake > 20 g/day or history of alcohol abuse, history of depressive disorder and/or of attempted suicide, and psychotropic drug intake. Conversely, age, gender, country of birth, positive HCV serology and HIV-related factors, such as AIDS status, use of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), nadir and current CD4 counts and HIV viral load, were not significantly associated with the risk of death from suicide. CONCLUSIONS: In the cART era, HIV-related factors are not associated with a higher risk of suicide mortality. Suicide prevention measures should target PLHIV with the psychological morbidities observed in our cohort

Clinical Methodology Matters in Epidemiology: Not All Benzodiazepines Are the Same.

Abstract: Whitlock [1] emphasized the importance of specifying and testing explicit hypotheses in clinical epidemiology, particularly if such hypotheses might lead to practical measures to prevent and treat mental disorders. Pharmacoepidemiology, with particular reference to benzodiazepines, may illustrate the value of Whitlock’s considerations. For a long time benzodiazepines have provided an effective treatment for anxiety disorders [5] , sleep disorders and a variety of medical conditions such as epilepsy and alcohol withdrawal [6] . Their large number of prescriptions raised many concerns and attempts at limiting their use [5] . The introduction of second-generation antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs has provided more expensive modalities of addressing anxiety disorders [7] . Substituting benzodiazepines with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and serotonin-noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors (SNRI) clearly appeared the commercial way to go. Such a road would have been difficult when new medications had to be compared to a gold standard, since direct comparisons clearly indicated higher efficacy and tolerability of benzodiazepines over antidepressants [8] . However, when such superiority was no longer required by regulatory agencies, alternative routes appeared. One was to perform comparisons by meta-analytic methods that are liable to manipulation instead of head-toIn 1977, at a time when psychiatric epidemiology was not as fashionable as it is today, Whitlock [1] outlined its aims and limitations. He criticized a narrow view of psychiatric epidemiology as concerned with the incidence, prevalence and distribution of mental disorders in the general population. He found ‘the pursuit of investigations of this kind a singularly sterile activity, largely because it is difficult to see what possible purpose such enterprises have [...]. Head counting to establish prevalence norms is tedious and can rarely be carried out in any comprehensive fashion by those trained to recognize and treat mental disorders’ [ 1 , p. 11]. Studies concerned with prevalence rates, however, achieved a prominent role in the subsequent decades [2] . Even though such studies were not driven by financial conflicts of interest, they served an important commercial purpose. Expanding the target of psychotropic drug prescription to potentially universal consumption is facilitated by showing that psychiatric illness is widespread, undetected and undertreated [3] . Epidemiological studies are generally conducted using lay or poorly trained interviewers who cannot translate obtained data into clinical context and do not have the skills to judge whether the symptoms they elicit are severe enough to cause clinically significant distress or impairment [3] . There are very few exceptions to this rule [4] . Received: June 10, 2015 Accepted after revision: June 25, 2015 Published online: August 6, 2015