Bipolar Disorder Manic Depression

New measures are being considered to help patients with bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depression, to cope with their illness grinding. Surprising options are being tested as possible treatment for this disease, such as motion sickness patch, a drug used to treat Lou Gehrig's disease and a device that produces an electric field around the brain.

Bipolar disorder is complex and mysterious disease characterized by severe mood swings, from mania to depression. A person can experience periods of increased energy, over-activity, irritability and sometimes delusions during the manic phase, and low mood, reduced concentration, sleep disturbance and ideas of self-harm during the depression. This condition can ruin careers and marriages apart. Extreme cases of depression may even push desperate people to commit suicide.

Despite years of study, the researchers have not yet developed a drug specifically for bipolar disorder. Anti-depression currently sold on the market to help reduce symptoms, but often fall short of full treatment.

Nothing is certain in the last round of treatment options that even includes the drug tamoxifen for breast cancer. Approaches have been identified by logic, and others by pure chance. However, scientists already have evidence that a day at the beginning of these treatments may prove useful against bipolar disorder.

People with mania may experience periods of boosted energy and restlessness that can run for a week or more, resulting in insomnia and extreme irritability. During this episode, a person may make unusual behavior, such as rabies and promiscuity.

On the other hand, episodes of depression that characterizes the other side of the coin bipolar, a period of boredom, sleepiness and lack of energy, which can last a week or more. Again, even suicidal thoughts may enter the picture.

Current treatments include a variety of bipolar medications, including lithium and anticonvulsants and other antipsychotic drugs that can stabilize mood. Psychological therapy and patient education greatly increase the effectiveness of these drugs.

What bipolar disorder is difficult to treat his depressive episodes are more severe and more resistant to the therapy of ordinary unipolar depression. Some common medications bipolar side effects, including weight gain, sleepiness, tremor, and the feeling of being "drugged".

As in the case of lithium, the new batch of possible treatments for bipolar disorder have revealed their potential by accident. Take the experience of the National Institute of Mental Health researchers Maura Furey and Dr. Wayne Drevets with the drug scopolamine, which is normally used to stop people seasick or carsick. When they were studying whether scopolamine could improve memory and attention in depressed people, they noticed a strange thing that patients started feeling less depressed the night after the injections, a remarkable thing that most antidepressants take weeks to run in.
In October 2006, after Drevets and Furey changed their area of research to test the drug's effect on depression itself, they published an encouraging, albeit preliminary, result with a small group of depressed patients, some of whom had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Furey is now conducting a study using scopolamine skin patches --- like those travelers wear to prevent motion sickness --- to treat depression in bipolar disorder, depression and ordinary. For now, people should not try patch treatment for depression on their own, "she said.

A similar incident occurred at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., in 2001, when patients with bipolar depression who received their brains scanned for a study of brain chemistry suddenly felt a lot better. And in 2004, they published their c.