Word: serotonin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...medicate or not to medicate? The dilemma can be traced back to 1987, when the FDA approved Prozac as the first of a new class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Prozac had none of the more serious side effects and risks of the earlier antidepressants and worked faster to control depressive symptoms. Prozac and the other SSRIs (they now include Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa) had one other advantage over the older, tricyclic antidepressants: children responded to them. One of the few recent studies on the subject showed that among depressed children ages...
...reason is that Paxil, Prozac, Luvox and the others all target the same brain chemical, called serotonin, which seems to govern mood. Too little serotonin, and patients tend to feel negative about themselves and the world around them in one way or another. How that dissatisfaction manifests itself--clinical depression, anxiety, phobias, obsessions, even eating disorders--depends on a complex web of factors that researchers have yet to unravel. But they do know that drugs that keep serotonin from being reabsorbed too quickly into the nerve cells--the so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs--tend to alleviate these...
PROZAC Eli Lilly launched Prozac in 1988. It works by blocking serotonin rather than allowing it to be released from the brain. Though it was initially controversial, more than 35 million people have got a lift from...
Some doctors are worried that emotional development will suffer too. It's one thing to fool around with serotonin levels in a brain that's already hardened and set, but quite another thing to manipulate a young, still elastic brain. And if children learn to medicate depression away, when do they develop the coping skills to weather psychic squalls on their...
...mess with Ecstasy. Doctors report that heavy use of the recreational drug--say, 70 to 400 hits--may cause long-lasting brain damage. Ecstasy appears to attack the brain cells that produce serotonin--the master chemical of mood, appetite and memory...