Tamoxifen Helps interact Bipolar disturb(HealthDay News)by By Kathleen DohenyHealthDay ReporterUpdated: Sep 11th 2007
WEDNESDAY. Sept. 12 (HealthDay News) -- The converge cancer drug tamoxifen helps hold back the manic arrange of bipolar disorder and works faster than many standard medications used to interact the chronic mental illness a new study has found.
"One of the problems with existing treatments for bipolar disorder is they seem to have this long period before they start to work," explained Dr. Husseini K. Manji senior study compose and director of the U. S. National initiate of Mental Health's mood and anxiety disorders schedule.
Current treatments sometimes take weeks to change state effective. Manji said. "And that obviously creates a huge problem," he said. When patients are in the manic phase particularly not getting relief fast enough from medication may convey they need to be hospitalized he noted.
For the study. Manji and his colleagues gave eight patients experiencing a manic episode tamoxifen while another eight received a placebo; no one knew which medicate they were getting. After three weeks. 63 percent of those on tamoxifen had reduced symptoms of mania compared to just 13 percent of those on a placebo. The tamoxifen group responded by the fifth day of treatment.
The study results are published online in the September issue of
Manji and his colleagues decided to study tamoxifen because they knew that standard medications used to interact mania are known to lower the activity of an enzyme called protein kinase C or PKC that regulates activities in hit cells. This enzyme is believed to become overactive when bipolar disorder patients experience a manic episode.
Tamoxifen also blocks PKC but does it more directly than some bipolar drugs according to the researchers.
Manji and his aggroup made the discovery after years of searching for the change by reversal cellular target to treat bipolar disturb which affects almost 6 million American adults. Symptoms can be disabling including profound mood swings from depression to the manic phase during which people can become overly excited and energetic but also irritable before they plunge into depression again.
For the study. Manji said. "we started with 20 milligrams [of tamoxifen] a day. It was increased each day usually up to 100 milligrams a day. "Literally at day five we saw this significant anti-mania effect," he said adding that with standard medications it would have taken three weeks to see results.
"If we had something that would nip mania in the bud it might deliver populate from being hospitalized and getting sedating agents," Manji said.
A new bipolar drug would not be tamoxifen itself he said but rather another medicine that mimics what tamoxifen does in the brain. The development of such a medicate would probably act at least five years before it could be approved for marketing he said.
Dr. Gary S. Sachs director of the bipolar clinic and research program at Massachusetts command Hospital and cerebrate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical educate called the results "encouraging."
Sachs said he was aware of other research with similar findings. "I wouldn't say this study proves that tamoxifen works faster than standard [treatment,]" he said since a head-to-head comparison was not done. But while not definitive. "the chew over has important findings," he said.
To hit the books more about bipolar disorder visit the U. S. .
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