Word: prozac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...symptoms were as familiar as the runny nose of a cold or the scratchiness of a strep throat. "You can't sleep, you can't eat, you lose weight because your mood's so blue." Schwendener, 33, suffered her first bout of depression as a teenager. She started taking Prozac 10 years ago. "The pain," she says, "sort of evaporated over time." By the age of 21, Beth Herwig, now an executive assistant in St. Louis, Mo., tipped the scales at more than 500 lbs. At 29, after years of yo-yo dieting, she was carrying...
...growing awareness of serotonin's central role in mood and emotion has been paralleled--and in some cases driven--by a boom in drugs that target serotonin more or less specifically. Among them are such popular antidepressants as Elavil, Prozac, Zoloft and the hot new herbal medication St. John's wort; powerful appetite suppressants including Redux and fenfluramine; and antipsychotics such as clozapine. Like every other drug, the ones that zero in on serotonin have side effects. Elavil makes people sleepy. Zoloft can trigger headache and nausea. Zoloft and Prozac may cause sexual dysfunction. All these symptoms are annoying...
...broadly. The research seemed to point to serotonin as the most important mood-enhancing chemical, though not the only one, and so neurochemists set about looking for a drug that would boost the influence of serotonin alone. In 1974, after a decade of work, Eli Lilly came up with Prozac, first of the so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIS, and it was finally approved...
Biochemically, hypericum has some interesting properties. For starters, says University of Frankfurt psychopharmacologist Walter Muller, it appears to affect the brain in the same way Prozac does--by prolonging the activity of the mood-enhancing brain chemical serotonin. This is the same neurotransmitter acted on by the controversial diet pills fen-phen and Redux (see following story). But hypericum has much broader activity. In rats and mice, at least, it extends the action of at least two other powerful brain chemicals that are thought to play a role in depression: dopamine and norepinephrine. In each case, hypericum appears to work...
...Paul had between 1.75 and 1.87 grams of alcohol per liter of blood, nearly four times the legal blood-alcohol limit of 0.5. To that, last week, were added explosive toxicology results: Paul's blood also contained "therapeutic" amounts of fluoxetine (the generic name for the antidepressant Prozac) and trace amounts of tiapride, a drug used to treat various conditions and is sometimes prescribed to quiet symptoms of agitation and aggressiveness in patients being treated for alcoholism. Alcohol (in Paul's case, equal to eight or nine shots of straight whiskey) combined with the antidepressants would greatly intensify the side...