Word: prozac
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...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...
Finally, the development of Prozac led to a number of surprises--the discovery that it was good for obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, as well as for panic disorder and social phobias. Clinicians also noticed that Prozac patients tended to lose weight, an intriguing finding, considering how many Americans are obese. But the weight loss was transitory, so Lilly scientists went back into the lab to see if they could reformulate Prozac as an effective obesity drug...
Their efforts failed, but Richard Wurtman, an M.I.T. neurologist and Lilly consultant, took a different approach. Instead of using Prozac as a starting point, he turned to fenfluramine, a European weight-loss drug. Because fenfluramine acts on both serotonin and dopamine, it has the unfortunate side effect of putting its users to sleep. That is why doctors came up with fen/phen; the "phen" (phentermine) is an amphetamine-like drug that wakes the patient up again and boosts the metabolism to burn calories faster. Wurtman separated fenfluramine into its two component chemicals, levofenfluramine and dexfenfluramine. The latter has revealed itself...
...would they? After all, other serotonin enhancers, such as Prozac, have never caused heart problems. There is a crucial difference, however, between Prozac and Redux-fenfluramine. The former, like the other SSRIS, keeps serotonin in circulation longer than it would otherwise be, thus helping the brain get the most out of its normal output. The latter do the same, but they also force nerve cells to boost the levels of serotonin that go into circulation. It is this unnatural bath of excess serotonin, some scientists theorize, that causes heart-valve defects and also triggers brain damage--in monkeys...