Word: prozac
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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...
...hoopla over hypericum began in Germany, where Jarsin, not Prozac, is the No. 1 antidepressant. This isn't as surprising as it may sound. German physicians are far more willing than their American counterparts to recommend herbal medications to patients. And a string of studies by German scientists, many of them sponsored by Lichtwer, have built a tantalizing if tentative case for hypericum's effectiveness as a treatment for mild and moderate depression. The result: so many German psychiatrists and general practitioners now recommend hypericum preparations that sales have soared from $23 million in 1994 to $66 million last year...
Still, the German experience suggests that St. John's wort is relatively harmless. "Millions of people have taken, or are now taking, hypericum," observes Jerry Cott, a Maryland-based pharmacologist, "and none of the side effects reported have been anything like those we've seen with drugs like Prozac. That's kind of exciting." Indeed, just as aspirin (whose active ingredient was first isolated from the bark of the willow tree) has spurred the development of a new generation of anti-inflammatories, so hypericum may eventually stimulate the creation of safer, more powerful, antidepressant drugs...
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...