Word: serotonin
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Doctors are more divided than ever over the safety of prescribing antidepressant drugs--Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft and other so-called selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)--to depressed children and teens. British health-care officials last month warned doctors against giving any SSRI but Prozac to kids, citing studies that suggest the drugs may trigger suicidal behavior. The FDA issued a similar warning against Paxil but held off on the other SSRIs pending further study. Now an American College of Neuropsychopharmacology task force, having reviewed the data, says the link to suicide is weak and that the drugs' benefits outweigh...
...help people like Washington for whom sex just isn't working. And indeed, over the past decade or two, scientists have identified many of the pieces of this complex puzzle. It clearly involves testosterone, along with other hormones, including estrogen and oxytocin, and brain chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. And there are numerous other bodily chemicals that turn us on, ranging from the commonplace, nitric oxide, to the obscure, vasoactive intestinal polypeptide...
Another neurotransmitter almost certainly involved in the biochemistry of desire is serotonin, which, like dopamine, plays a role in feelings of satisfaction. Antidepressants like Prozac, which enhance mood by keeping serotonin in circulation longer than usual, can paradoxically depress the ability to achieve orgasm. But "dopamine and serotonin," says Heiman, "appear to interact with each other in a complicated way to impact desire...
...working hypothesis was that three related chemicals in the brain--dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin--play a role in romantic passion. I speculated that the feelings of euphoria, sleeplessness and loss of appetite as well as the lover's intense energy, focused attention and increased passion in the face of adversity might all be caused in part by heightened levels of dopamine or norepinephrine in the brain. Similarly, I believed that the lover's obsessive thinking about the beloved might be due to decreased brain activity of some type of serotonin. I also knew these three compounds were much more prevalent...
...says that for mild to moderate depression, patients should have the choice of either a specific kind of short-term therapy, called cognitive-behavioral therapy, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication, or sometimes both. This is the type of treatment offered at UHS, he says...