I am a chronic, lifetime PTSD sufferer about to turn 40. Damned if I don't do something to help find a decent treatment of any kind.
Yoga was helpful to me in feeling better overall during a time of almost remission, but gave me massive headaches. I'm not sure why. SSRI's made me feel absolutely worse by about 50-100%.
New drugs are being studied as researchers seek treatments that are easy/cheap. There are so many people with PTSD now due to long term warfare, multiple deployments, Traumatic Brain Injury and other traumatic injuries, terrorism, rape, and other world wide chaos problems.
Prevention of PTSD in the first place would be ideal by creating a better world, especially for the next generation. That ought to remain in the forefront of today's leaders' minds.
And for all of us with unrelenting and chronic PTSD as a life sentence, a set of tested and safe treatments is needed very badly to treat the whole disorder or at least multiple symptom clusters, which clearly affect each other.
In this post, I am interested in Ketamine and Riluzole. I'm new to learning about this class of drug. So any information you have is relevant to my inquiry. I am not on any Rx for PTSD as of June, 2016. I have decided none of them do my any good. I tend to feel worse on any drug. I use daily Grapefruit juice, which I find seems to regulate my hormones (it has clinically significant effects on Estrogen levels) to the extent that this aids my body's ability to regulate "fight/flight/freeze" response to daily triggers, external and internal. (I still get triggered, but my body doesn't seem to react with the same level of FFF, and I am usually able to keep doing normal life things while processing through the trigger and talking my way out of it). I still feel the emotions of fear, dread, horror, anger, helplessness, guilt, blame, etc.. But I am able to "feel" that I'm feeling them without them taking control of my actions. I dissociate less without drugs in my system.
So I am not, at this time, a big fan of any Rx treatment for chronic PTSD, as it's not been very helpful to me other than taking Clonodine and Xanax during total overwhelm until stress levels are more normal and natural management takes over again. That said, I believe that I am not a fan due to the fact that most drugs treat only one subset of symptoms, and nothing has been made that will be effective and not have side effects and "negative" symptom side effects, such as feeling more numbed, drugged, and less alive.
If you have participated in a study to test the efficacy of Riluzole or its cousin Ketamine, or have used Ketamine, recreational use, I am interested in your experiences and opinions on this class of drug. I am curious because it is one of several drugs being studied by more than one agency for potential PTSD FDA approval in less than 3 years (they desire).
This is a 4-year study (2014-2018) being done "A Pilot Study of Riluzole in Patients with PTSD" : A Pilot Study Of Riluzole In Patients With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - Full Text View - ClinicalTrials.gov
by Yale. The participant will take 12 weeks of the experimental drug and undergo clinical assessments to measure results.
This study will end next year, 2018, and if proven efficacious enough and safe for use, it will be used for PTSD, perhaps offlabel, as is Clonidine now. However, it is also a controlled substance, so not especially convenient.
The study needs 20 people to complete it, and that would seem easy to do in less than four years. Both Yale (Christopher Kelly) and the National Center for PTSD in Connecticut (Chadi Abdallah, M.D.) report doing the same study within the same years (so far as I can tell). It may be a case of sharing data or private Yale vs. public National center.
Either way, there is hope of developing an FDA approved drug specifically for PTSD. While Zoloft and Paxil are currently the only two drugs approved by the FDA for PTSD, neither is proven effective. In fact effectiveness falls well below placebo effect.
I personally took both when they were new in the late 90's and felt worse on all SSRI's. I was placed on Zoloft, then Paxil, then Effexor. I would never use any of these again. I was placed on Prozac, low dose, later, but this leads to over-stimulation.
The research I have read says that PTSD doesn't work on the same neurotransmitter pathways as clinical depression, which is why SSRI's do not work for PTSD.
Ketamine is an anesthetic used for human and veterinary surgery. Vets with burns who had surgery who were given Ketamine as the surgical anesthetic were found to have PTSD at lower rates (20% rate range) vs. those who were given a different anesthetic (40% range). Also, after a single IV dose of Ketamine, patients with severe depression felt the depression and suicidal tendencies totally lift for up to 7 days post med.
Taking Ketamine long-term has serious side effects. But research is focused on targeting it's IV administration along with exposure and memory reconsolidation because Ketamine may help to take the traumatic memories away from the PTSD storage pathways and move the memories to the more normal narrative memory pathways, thus rerouting them, and shutting down PTSD's intrusive memories, lowering depression and pain, and creating a new neural pathway.
I am not expert in any of this, but I wanted to know about anyone's experiences with this class of drug and PTSD.
I like that researchers are combining the drug with new takes on traditional talk therapies, such as in "
TIMBER Psychotherapy and Ketamine Single Infusion in Chronic PTSD."
Any thoughts welcome! Thanks in advance for your ideas.
Yoga was helpful to me in feeling better overall during a time of almost remission, but gave me massive headaches. I'm not sure why. SSRI's made me feel absolutely worse by about 50-100%.
New drugs are being studied as researchers seek treatments that are easy/cheap. There are so many people with PTSD now due to long term warfare, multiple deployments, Traumatic Brain Injury and other traumatic injuries, terrorism, rape, and other world wide chaos problems.
Prevention of PTSD in the first place would be ideal by creating a better world, especially for the next generation. That ought to remain in the forefront of today's leaders' minds.
And for all of us with unrelenting and chronic PTSD as a life sentence, a set of tested and safe treatments is needed very badly to treat the whole disorder or at least multiple symptom clusters, which clearly affect each other.
In this post, I am interested in Ketamine and Riluzole. I'm new to learning about this class of drug. So any information you have is relevant to my inquiry. I am not on any Rx for PTSD as of June, 2016. I have decided none of them do my any good. I tend to feel worse on any drug. I use daily Grapefruit juice, which I find seems to regulate my hormones (it has clinically significant effects on Estrogen levels) to the extent that this aids my body's ability to regulate "fight/flight/freeze" response to daily triggers, external and internal. (I still get triggered, but my body doesn't seem to react with the same level of FFF, and I am usually able to keep doing normal life things while processing through the trigger and talking my way out of it). I still feel the emotions of fear, dread, horror, anger, helplessness, guilt, blame, etc.. But I am able to "feel" that I'm feeling them without them taking control of my actions. I dissociate less without drugs in my system.
So I am not, at this time, a big fan of any Rx treatment for chronic PTSD, as it's not been very helpful to me other than taking Clonodine and Xanax during total overwhelm until stress levels are more normal and natural management takes over again. That said, I believe that I am not a fan due to the fact that most drugs treat only one subset of symptoms, and nothing has been made that will be effective and not have side effects and "negative" symptom side effects, such as feeling more numbed, drugged, and less alive.
If you have participated in a study to test the efficacy of Riluzole or its cousin Ketamine, or have used Ketamine, recreational use, I am interested in your experiences and opinions on this class of drug. I am curious because it is one of several drugs being studied by more than one agency for potential PTSD FDA approval in less than 3 years (they desire).
This is a 4-year study (2014-2018) being done "A Pilot Study of Riluzole in Patients with PTSD" : A Pilot Study Of Riluzole In Patients With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - Full Text View - ClinicalTrials.gov
by Yale. The participant will take 12 weeks of the experimental drug and undergo clinical assessments to measure results.
This study will end next year, 2018, and if proven efficacious enough and safe for use, it will be used for PTSD, perhaps offlabel, as is Clonidine now. However, it is also a controlled substance, so not especially convenient.
The study needs 20 people to complete it, and that would seem easy to do in less than four years. Both Yale (Christopher Kelly) and the National Center for PTSD in Connecticut (Chadi Abdallah, M.D.) report doing the same study within the same years (so far as I can tell). It may be a case of sharing data or private Yale vs. public National center.
Either way, there is hope of developing an FDA approved drug specifically for PTSD. While Zoloft and Paxil are currently the only two drugs approved by the FDA for PTSD, neither is proven effective. In fact effectiveness falls well below placebo effect.
I personally took both when they were new in the late 90's and felt worse on all SSRI's. I was placed on Zoloft, then Paxil, then Effexor. I would never use any of these again. I was placed on Prozac, low dose, later, but this leads to over-stimulation.
The research I have read says that PTSD doesn't work on the same neurotransmitter pathways as clinical depression, which is why SSRI's do not work for PTSD.
Ketamine is an anesthetic used for human and veterinary surgery. Vets with burns who had surgery who were given Ketamine as the surgical anesthetic were found to have PTSD at lower rates (20% rate range) vs. those who were given a different anesthetic (40% range). Also, after a single IV dose of Ketamine, patients with severe depression felt the depression and suicidal tendencies totally lift for up to 7 days post med.
Taking Ketamine long-term has serious side effects. But research is focused on targeting it's IV administration along with exposure and memory reconsolidation because Ketamine may help to take the traumatic memories away from the PTSD storage pathways and move the memories to the more normal narrative memory pathways, thus rerouting them, and shutting down PTSD's intrusive memories, lowering depression and pain, and creating a new neural pathway.
I am not expert in any of this, but I wanted to know about anyone's experiences with this class of drug and PTSD.
I like that researchers are combining the drug with new takes on traditional talk therapies, such as in "
TIMBER Psychotherapy and Ketamine Single Infusion in Chronic PTSD."
Any thoughts welcome! Thanks in advance for your ideas.