(Heath.com) — As recently as 10 years ago, doctors advised women with bipolar disorder not to have children. While that thinking is now dated, bipolar women often face tough decisions about how to handle their medication during pregnancy.

Most drugs prescribed for bipolar disorder carry some risk of birth defects, yet women who discontinue medication risk relapsing into a manic or depressive episode; during the postpartum phase the relapse rate is as high as 50 percent to 70 percent, by some estimates.

Even more alarming, bipolar women are 100 times more likely than other women to experience postpartum psychosis, a severe mood disorder that, at its very worst, can result in infanticide.

Sally, 38, started taking lithium after a severe manic episode eight years ago. She eventually switched to other drugs, but in 2007 she stopped her medication altogether when she learned that she was pregnant.

The pregnancy was uneventful. Her daughter, Stella, did arrive six weeks early, but after 21 days in the hospital Stella was finally at home and thriving.

Sally, meanwhile, was falling apart.

“I was extremely hyperactive,” she says. “I was going a million miles an hour.” Everyone had told her, “When the baby sleeps, you sleep” — but she couldn’t rest. While Stella napped, Sally would clean her Jackson, New Jersey, home yet again, wiping down doorknobs and light switches. She baked blueberry cobbler at 6 a.m. and pulled weeds into the night.

Though she had restarted her meds the day she gave birth to Stella, after a string of sleepless nights several months later Sally finally realized that lithium was the only thing that would bring her back to her senses. And it did.

Yet Sally continued to have doubts that she was strong enough to be a mother. These are doubts that many women with bipolar disorder share.

Say no to drugs?

Meredith, 27, of Dix Hills, New York, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2007 and began taking lithium. Two years later, as she was planning her wedding, she took a cocktail of mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and antipsychotics: lithium, Abilify, propranolol (Inderal), and escitalopram (Lexapro).

“I was grateful for the lithium at first,” says Meredith, who did not want her last name used. “But then I was like, ‘There go all my options for having kids.’”

When it was first approved by the FDA in 1970, lithium was believed to cause heart-valve defects in an extremely high percentage of infants born to mothers who were on the drug (about 1 in 50). Decades later, new research has downgraded the risk, to about 1 in 1,000 to 2,000.

Bipolar medications aren’t considered as risky during pregnancy as they once were, but they aren’t exactly harmless either. According to the FDA’s letter-grade system for drug safety during pregnancy, most psychotropic drugs pose a potential risk to the fetus. Studies have found that the anticonvulsants valproic acid (Depakote) and carbemazepine (Tegretol) can cause birth defects ranging from physical deformities to spina bifida, for instance, while some research suggests that another anticonvulsant, lamotrigine, may carry an increased risk of cleft palate.

The risk of birth defects is small, yet the decision to stop taking medication is common, even among women with severe psychiatric illness. In 2008, after she got engaged, and after consulting her psychiatrist, Meredith decided to start tapering off lithium. “I, personally, would like to not be on any medication,” she says, when considering a future pregnancy. “I just don’t want to take any chances.”

Should bipolar women discontinue their medication? According to reproductive psychiatrist Catherine Birndorf, M.D., the founding director of the Payne Whitney Women’s Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital, “There’s not just one answer.” The severity of bipolar disorder varies widely from person to person, and for this reason it’s difficult to standardize care for pregnant women with the disorder, Birndorf explains. “Each case must be considered on an individual basis,” she says.

But what many of Bindorf’s patients do not initially realize is that untreated illness — and not just medication — can be risky. According to a 2007 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, women who discontinued mood stabilizers during pregnancy spent over 40 percent of their pregnancy in an “illness episode.” And research suggests that the effects of maternal depression on the fetus can lead to complications both during and after pregnancy.

Still, many bipolar women believe they have to stop taking all of their medications for the sake of their child — and often psychiatrists or OB/GYNs steer women away from medication, according to Margaret Spinelli, M.D., director of the Women’s Program in Psychiatry at Columbia University.

“I hope that women will come to a perinatal psychiatrist to get an evaluation,” says Spinelli. “Because they can become so ill. And the problem is that if they become really ill during the pregnancy off the medication, it may take a lot more medication to stabilize them.”

Postpartum planning

A complication-free pregnancy with or without medication doesn’t mean a woman is in the clear. For any bipolar mother, the trickiest time is not the pregnancy itself but the postpartum period.

Postpartum difficulties are not limited to bipolar women, of course. Many women experience the crying episodes known as the “baby blues,” and an estimated 10% of women go through a more severe postpartum depression. Women with bipolar disorder are at much higher risk, however; postpartum psychosis — which is believed to be a form of bipolar disorder — occurs in as many as 25 percent to 50 percent of deliveries.

While postpartum psychosis is a serious risk, it’s a risk that can be treated, and often prevented, with medication. It’s extremely important for a woman with bipolar disorder to have a plan in place with her family and her doctors in the event that she does become psychotic, says Spinelli. Due to the high risk of psychosis, bipolar women should “really start medicines at least before they deliver,” she adds.

As the field of perinatal psychiatry grows, many bipolar women are choosing to stay on medications to avoid any chance of postpartum psychosis or manic episodes. “I’d heard so many horror stories of people harming the baby,” says Michele Noll, 38, of Atlanta, who has delivered two healthy babies while taking mood stabilizers.

“I did not have mood swings,” Noll says of her pregnancy and postpartum period. “Nobody even knew I was bipolar.”

Breast-feeding presents another challenge. Even though some medications are safe while nursing, feeding a baby requires waking up often throughout the night. And in people with bipolar disorder, sleep deprivation can trigger a manic episode.

Shanun Carey, 26, of Manchester, N.H., became so manic while breast-feeding that she was “bouncing off the walls,” eventually volunteering to clean her neighbors’ apartments to burn off excess energy. When her daughter was six months old, Carey realized she had to stop breast-feeding to get healthy again; she switched to formula so she could resume her medications and a regular sleep schedule.

Formula isn’t the only solution. Rachael Bender, 31, of Naples, Florida, who writes a blog called My Bipolar Pregnancy, realized that losing sleep would be a huge challenge in trying to breast-feed. But she did want to try, so she and her husband worked out a system when her daughter was an infant.

To save Bender from getting the baby up and back to sleep, her husband slept in the guest room, next to the bassinet, and brought the baby in to Bender when the baby was hungry. “The hardest thing about the whole pregnancy,” Bender says, “was the sleep after she was born.”

The next generation

Sally, who lapsed into depression after the lithium got her mania under control, still struggles with the ups and downs of bipolar disorder. Because she is committed to being a great parent to Stella, she has made what she says is the most difficult decision of her life.

“Absolutely, I will not have another baby,” Sally says, acknowledging that no matter how many times her healthy daughter kisses her, or her husband tells her she’s a wonderful mother, she still has doubts related to her bipolar disorder and the amount of attention it requires. “I want to be the best mother I can be, and if I had two children I’d worry that I was spreading myself too thin,” she says.

Meredith knows that pregnancy will be “a difficult time,” and people have already questioned her decision to have children; a family friend even told her that it would be a “heartache” for her if she did have a child with bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder does tend to run in families: Studies show that a person is 10 times more likely to develop the disorder if a parent is bipolar.

None of this has swayed Meredith’s desire to be a mother.

“I’m not going to not have a child because I’m afraid they’re going to be bipolar,” says Meredith. “I’ve seen so many wonderful things and I’ve done so many wonderful things, and I plan to do a lot more. My kid will have a better life than a lot of kids out there. This isn’t going to stop me.”

Background

The Air Force Suicide Prevention Program (AFSPP) was implemented in 1997. Based on the premise that individuals at risk for suicide exhibit early warning signs, AFSPP emphasizes leadership and community involvement in reducing suicide by encouraging Air Force leaders to actively support and get involved with suicide prevention efforts. It trains commanders in how and when to seek out mental health services for their troops, provides training to all military and civilian personnel in suicide prevention, and incorporates other community-based components.

Kerry Knox, Ph.D., of the University of Rochester Medical Center, and colleagues studied the impact of AFSPP in reducing suicide among Air Force personnel from 1997 until 2008. They examined suicide rates from 1981 to 2008 to provide historical context during three military conflicts, and a downsizing of the Air Force that occurred in the 1990s.

Results of the Study

The researchers found that suicide rates were significantly lower after the program was launched than before—an average of two suicides per 100,000 per quarter occurred during the intervention period compared to three suicides per 100,000 per quarter prior to the intervention rollout. During the third quarter of 2004, however, suicide rates increased. Knox and colleagues suggest that the upward spike may have been the result of a diminished implementation of ASFPP due to increased demands from the two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In response, Air Force leadership took steps to strengthen implementation of the program and ensure compliance of its components, according to the authors.

Significance

The results suggest that the program is effective but its success is contingent on continuous implementation efforts and ongoing monitoring. The program cannot be maintained by “inherent momentum,” the authors concluded.

What’s Next

The authors suggest that the program, if maintained and monitored for compliance, can continue to keep suicide rates low in the Air Force. They also suggest that the program could be implemented in other communities and organizations to prevent suicide and reduce the stigma associated with the mental and psychosocial problems that often precipitate suicide attempts.

Reference

Knox K, Pflanz S, Talcott GW, Campise RL, Lavigne JE, Bajorska A, Tu X, Caine ED. The US Air Force Suicide Prevention Program: Implications for Public Health Policy. American Journal of Public Health. Online ahead of print May 13, 2010.

The study compared the death records of 647 Akron, Ohio, residents who had been receiving services for serious and persistent mental illness at a community mental health center and 15,517 residents in the general population of Akron. The people with serious mental illness lost 14.5 years of potential life, with an average age at death of 73.4 years, while the other residents lost 10.3 years of potential life, and died at an average age of 79.6 years. Heart disease was the leading cause of death for both groups. Premature mortality among persons with serious mental illness was increased by cancer, liver disease, and septicemia. Those with psychiatric disorders were also more likely to die from unnatural causes, such as suicide, accidents, and assault.
While it is well established that people with serious mental illness die much sooner that those without, this study looked specifically at years of potential life lost after adjusting for sociodemographic factors and cause of death. Factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, education, and marital status were related to premature mortality, but did not account for the difference in years of potential life lost between the two groups of Akron residents. In addition, most previous studies looked at deaths among samples of hospitalized psychiatric patients, who would be expected to be more ill than patients living in the community. However, even in this healthier sample, the study found a significant degree of premature
mortality.
The researchers concluded that along with ongoing suicide prevention programs, efforts to integrate primary and psychiatric care should focus on the preventable causes of early death. The authors also noted that the concept of every patient’s having a mental health care home— integrating mental health care, primary health care, and wellness promotion holds great promise and may help to reduce the causes of preventable early death.
The researchers, all affiliated with Northeastern Ohio University College of Medicine and Pharmacy, included Elizabeth E. Piatt, Ph.D., Mark R. Munetz, M.D., and Christian Ritter, Ph.D.
The American Psychiatric Association is a national medical specialty society whose physician members
specialize in the diagnosis, treatment, prevention and research of mental illnesses, including substance
use disorders.

Visit the APA at www.psych.org and www.HealthyMinds.org.

Scientists have discovered a compound that restores the capacity to form new memories in aging rats, likely by improving the survival of newborn neurons in the brain’s memory hub. The research, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, has turned up clues to a neuroprotective mechanism that could lead to a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

“This neuroprotective compound, called P7C3, holds special promise because of its medication-friendly properties,” explained Steven McKnight, Ph.D., who co-led the research with Andrew Pieper, M.D., Ph.D., both of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. “It can be taken orally, crosses the blood-brain barrier with long-lasting effects, and is safely tolerated by mice during many stages of development.”

The researchers report on their findings July 9, 2010 in the journal Cell. Their work was funded, in part, by the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award funded through the Common Fund and managed by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and National Cancer Institute.

“This striking demonstration of a treatment that stems age-related cognitive decline in living animals points the way to potential development of the first cures that will address the core illness process in Alzheimer’s disease,” said NIMH Director Thomas Insel, M.D.

Physical activity, social, or other enriching experiences promote neurogenesis — the birth and maturation of new neurons. This growth takes place in the dentate gyrus, a key area of the brain’s memory hub, the hippocampus. But even in the normal adult brain, most of these newborn neurons die during the month it takes to develop and get wired into brain circuitry. To survive, the cells must run a gauntlet of challenges. Newborn hippocampus neurons fare much worse in aging-related disorders like Alzheimer’s, marked by runaway cell death.

In hopes of finding compounds that might protect such vulnerable neurons during this process, Pieper, McKnight and colleagues tested more than 1000 small molecules in living mice. One of the compounds, designated P7C3, corrected deficits in the brains of adult mice engineered to lack a gene required for the survival of newborn neurons in the hippocampus. Giving P7C3 to the mice reduced programmed death of newborn cells — normalizing stunted growth of branch-like neuronal extensions and thickening an abnormally thin layer of cells by 40 percent. Among clues to the mechanism by which P7C3 works, the researchers discovered that it protects the integrity of machinery for maintaining a cell’s energy level.

To find out if P7C3 could similarly stem aging-associated neuronal death and cognitive decline, the researchers gave the compound to aged rats. Rodents treated with P7C3 for two months significantly outperformed their placebo-treated peers on a water maze task, a standard assay of hippocampus-dependent learning. This was traced to a threefold higher-than-normal level of newborn neurons in the dentate gyrus of the treated animals. Rats were used instead of mice for this phase of the study because the genetically engineered mice could not swim.

The researchers pinpointed a derivative of P7C3, called A20, which is even more protective than the parent compound. They also produced evidence suggesting that two other neuroprotective compounds eyed as possible Alzheimer’s cures may work through the same mechanism as P7C3. The A20 derivative proved 300 times more potent than one of these compounds currently in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease. This suggested that even more potent neuroprotective agents could potentially be discovered using the same methods. Following up on these leads, the researchers are now searching for the molecular target of P7C3 – key to discovering the underlying neuroprotective mechanism.

The mission of the NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure. For more information, visit the NIMH website.

The NIH Common Fund encourages collaboration and supports a series of exceptionally high impact, trans-NIH programs. These new programs are funded through the Common Fund, and managed by the NIH Office of the Director in partnership with the various NIH Institutes, Centers and Offices. Common Fund programs are designed to pursue major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single NIH Institute could tackle alone, but that the agency as a whole can address to make the biggest impact possible on the progress of medical research. Additional information about the NIH Common Fund can be found at http://commonfund.nih.gov.

NIGMS is a part of NIH that supports basic research to increase our understanding of life processes and lay the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention. For more information on the Institute’s research and training programs, see http://www.nigms.nih.gov.

NCI leads the National Cancer Program and the NIH effort to dramatically reduce the burden of cancer and improve the lives of cancer patients and their families, through research into prevention and cancer biology, the development of new interventions, and the training and mentoring of new researchers. For more information about cancer, please visit the NCI Web site at http://www.cancer.gov or call NCI’s Cancer Information Service at 1-800-4-CANCER (1-800-422-6237).

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation’s Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit the NIH website.

(CNN) — Every Friday morning, students walk into an art class in Atlanta, Georgia. Some look dazed, uncertain in their environment, as if it’s vaguely familiar but they can’t fully recognize where they are — until they sit down and begin to draw.

The moment their brushes hit the paper, their faces light up. Using bright colors — yellows, oranges, greens, purples — they begin to transfer the images from their minds. Sometimes they paint what they want and sometimes they draw the highlighted centerpiece of the day. One week it’s vegetables, another week it’s hats. As their artworks progress, they look happy, smiling and glancing at their teachers for approval. They’re not the only ones who are pleased.

Tania Becker, president of the board of the Spruill Center in Atlanta, developed the Arts 4 Alzheimer’s program with the help of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Alzheimer’s Association. This program helps Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers escape the disease, even if only for a few hours.

“One of the ways to get to people with Alzheimer’s is to engage them through art, because art is so creative,” says Becker. “It’s the one thing, of course, you learn as a child, so those memories are still there and we can get into their memory bank through art. It’s just amazing to see how this works.”

An estimated 5.3 million Americans of all ages have Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The number could be as high as 13.4 million by 2050, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects. There is no cure.

As the world waits for a cure, Becker and her volunteers are reaching their students in a creative way. The class cuts through the isolation Alzheimer’s patients can experience and gives them a chance to express emotion through their art.

Bill and Carole Bates benefit from Arts 4 Alzheimer’s. They have been happily married since they were teenagers. After 57 years, they remain resilient partners.

After they learned Carole had Alzheimer’s, Bill wanted to read and learn everything he could about the disease. Then one day, he picked up the Spruill Center newsletter and found a class that he thought might help Carole: Arts 4 Alzheimer’s.

“I immediately wanted to become a part of it,” Bill says.

So they did. Every week Bill and Carole come to the class and sit down with others who share an understanding and circumstance. Instead of falling victim to this disease, people are celebrating their lives through their art.

Bill sometimes sits in the corner reading his newspaper. Every now and then Carole will gently grab her husband’s hand and look up at him with love and generosity. This class brings people away from the isolation they may experience and gives them a chance to be expressive through their art.

Carole loved the class so much, she asked her husband to take her to the Spruill Center on a day when class wasn’t in session just to be certain she wouldn’t miss.

In 2009, almost 11 million family members and friends provided unpaid care for a person with Alzheimer’s and other dementias; this resulted in an estimated 12.5 billion hours of care, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. This disease takes both victims and caregivers away from their lives and memories.

“One of the things about people with Alzheimer’s is that they have no yesterday and they have no tomorrow,” says Becker. “All they have is the now. So what we give them is a very special now here with their art.”

Some guys sound tough – and according to a new study, that may a good way of predicting whether they really are.

Results  in the current Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that people can accurately evaluate the upper-body strength based on men’s voices from four different populations and language groups. The voice samples came from the Tsimane of Bolivia, Andean herder-horticulturalists from Argentina, and college students from the United States and Romania.

Researchers recorded body size and strength measurements from women and men in each of these groups. These participants also reported how many fights they had been involved in during the last four years.

Then, undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Barbara, rated the voices on physical strength, height and weight. For the sample of male voices from the United States, raters assessed “how tough he would be in a physical fight.”

The study found that, for the sample where data were available, the higher the perceived fighting ability, the more fights the man in the voice sample had reported being involved in during the last four years. It is not known how many fights these men won, but previous research suggests that “more formidable individuals are those more likely to engage in fights,” the authors wrote.]

For the rest of the samples, regardless of language spoken in the speech samples, participants rating the voices reported mostly accurate predictions for physical strength for men, but not for women. There was no significant difference between how good men and women were at evaluating the voices.

The results support the idea that the human voice, especially the male voice, has cues of physical strength, and that humans have evolved to be able to predict fighting ability based on those cues. This would have had great benefit to human ancestors, who may have used this information to their survival benefit – for instance, in choosing whom to fight with and whom not to confront.

Update: The study did not determine specifically what qualities in the voices were associated with greater strength. Researchers found, however, that pitch and timbre were not explanatory factors. In other words, contrary to what you might expect, lower pitch was not associated with greater perceived strength.

Background

The NIMH Treatment of Early Onset Schizophrenia Study (TEOSS) included 116 youth between 8 and 19 years old, diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia spectrum disorder (EOSS). The TEOSS team randomly assigned the children to eight weeks of either olanzapine (Zyprexa) or risperidone (Risperdal)—both new generation atypical antipsychotics—or to the older conventional antipsychotic molindone (Moban). Response rates after eight weeks of treatment were comparable among the three medications. The results were reported in September 2008.

After the initial 8-week trial, 54 of the 116 participants entered the maintenance treatment phase in which they continued their initial medication and were monitored for up to 44 more weeks of treatment. Only 14 participants completed the additional 44 weeks of treatment.

Results of the Study

Robert Findling, M.D., of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and the TEOSS team reported that the participants’ treatment response tended to plateau during the follow-up, maintenance therapy period, such that most of the children did not improve beyond what they had already achieved during the initial eight weeks of treatment. In addition, most discontinued treatment during the maintenance phase, most commonly due to side effects such as weight gain, anxiety, increases in cholesterol levels, and other metabolic changes, regardless of which treatment they were receiving. None of the three medications appeared to be more effective than the others.

Significance

The findings suggest that few youths with EOSS continue treatment on the same antipsychotic medication over the long-term, with lack of effectiveness and adverse effects cited as the most common reasons for discontinuation. Most of those who initially responded to medication were able to at least maintain their initial improvements, but very few participants stayed on the medication through the 12-month study most frequently because of intolerable side effects.

What’s Next

The authors conclude that more effective and safer treatments need to be developed to treat children with EOSS.

Reference

Findling R. Johnson JL, McClellan J, Frazier JA, Vitiello B, Hamer RM, Lieberman JA, Ritz L, McNamara NK, Lingler J, Hlastala S, Pierson L, Puglia M, Maloney AE, Kaufman EM, Noyes N, Sikich L. Double-blind maintenance safety and effectiveness findings from the TEOSS. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Available online May 4, 2010.

Background

Currently available antidepressants typically require 3 to 4 weeks to take effect. In addition, despite a range of existing medications for depression, it’s estimated that 30 to 40 percent of patients do not respond at all to antidepressants. Developing new medications that act with alternative mechanisms to those already available—and more quickly—is an important goal of current research.

The most commonly used antidepressant medications affect signaling by serotonin, a neurotransmitter known to play a role in mood. Scopolamine interacts with cell receptors for another neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. Scopolamine is one of a class of compounds that block a specific type of receptor for acetylcholine (muscarinic receptors). Although various lines of research have suggested that acetylcholine-related activity plays a role in depression, to date, other neurotransmitter systems have been thought to be more central in the development of depression.

This Study

This study sought to replicate an earlier trial that demonstrated the ability of scopolamine to relieve symptoms of depression quickly in a group of patients with major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder. The current study focused on people with major depressive disorder. Like the earlier study, this one compared scopolamine with placebo, and was double-blind in that neither patients nor clinicians administering medication knew whether patients were receiving placebo or scopolamine (both were given intravenously).

After an initial treatment session in which all 22 patients in the trial received placebo once, half then received scopolamine three times, each treatment 3 to 5 days apart, and then placebo three more times, 3 to 5 days apart. The other half, after the initial placebo dose, received placebo three more times, then scopolamine three times. Patients receiving scopolamine first reported positive effects by the time they returned for a second dose 3 to 5 days later; many even reported improvement by the morning following treatment. After three treatments, their scores on a test for depression symptoms declined by 32 percent compared with 6.5 percent for placebo. These improved scores persisted until the end of the trial. Those receiving scopolamine after placebo had a 53 percent reduction in depression scores by the end of the clinical trial. Eleven of those in the trial experienced complete remission (one of those while on placebo).

Side-effects of scopolamine included drowsiness, dry mouth, light headedness, and blurred vision, but they were transient, resolving within hours.

Significance

Depression is a costly disease for both society and individuals. It is a leading cause of disability worldwide. For individuals and their family members, major depression is painful and frightening; depression is the predominant risk factor for suicide, the 11th leading cause of death in the U.S. The need for effective, rapid treatment alternatives is an urgent one.

While this is a small study, the difference between the response to scopolamine and placebo was statistically significant. By the end of the study 14 of the 22, or 64 percent of subjects, had achieved at least a 50 percent reduction in symptoms.

Subjects in the study reported short-term sedation but not euphoria with scopolamine. The antidepressant effects persisted weeks after the medication was no longer in the bloodstream. It is possible, according to the authors, that scopolamine’s antidepressant effects escaped notice earlier because it is usually used in smaller doses (such as for motion sickness) than in this study. The authors note the importance of replicating this work in larger groups of patients and developing more practical means of administering scopolamine. Further research will also provide information on the exact mechanism of action of the drug, a guide to development of additional new medications.

Dr. Maura Furey talks about her research with Scopolamine.

Read transcript.

References

Drevets, W.C. and Furey, M.L. Replication of scopolamine’s antidepressant efficacy in major depressive disorder: a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial. Biological Psychiatry 67:432-8, 2010.

Furey, M.L. and Drevets, W.C. Antidepressant efficacy of the antimuscarinic drug scopolamine. Archives of General Psychiatry 63:1121-1129, 2006.