4 ms·

"once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you’ll have a 95% chance of relapse." Unless you plan on spending the rest of your life seve

"once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you’ll have a 95% chance of relapse." Unless you plan on spending the rest of your life severely sleep deprived, this doesn't seem like a great solution.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
scythe 9y ago
There's a danger in tabbing back to the comments page after the third paragraph. A few paragraphs lower, you would have seen this: >So he and his colleagues turned to the scientific literature for ideas. A handful of American studies had suggested that lithium might prolong the effect of sleep deprivation, so they investigated that. They found that 65% of patients taking lithium showed a sustained response to sleep deprivation when assessed after three months, compared to just 10% of those not taking the drug.
- blueprint 9y ago
  wow that's so much better
- hateduser2 9y ago
  Sustained sleep deprivation by lithium doesn’t sound any better than sleep deprivation by literal lack of sleep.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  too bad lithium is such a hard drug to administer (it's psychoactive at doses very close to harmful doses, so usually there needs to be monitoring of the levels of lithium in the blood)
  - mislankanova 9y ago
    Long term use of lithium may also lead to kidney problems[1][2]. Monitoring of kidney function is also needed over a long time[3]. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25735990/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25735990/ [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0085253815326089 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S008525381... [3]https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/bipolar-disorder/treatment/#lithium-carbonate https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/bipolar-disorder/treatment/#li...
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    My mother has bipolar and takes lithium, it's scary stuff, the effective dose is so close to the toxicity dose that she has has to get her bloods checked every couple of weeks. The stuff works for her though, well enough that she sometimes feels she doesn't need it because she's OK, historically things have gone bad when that happens. Scary disease especially as they still unsure of the cause, we took part in a medical study 20ish years ago as they wanted siblings with a parent with bipolar so they could look for genetic causes/pre-dispositions.
- kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
  Sounds like: - induce mania by sleep deprivation - take lithium to counteract the mania
matt4077 9y ago
5% not relapsing is actually more than I would have expected, and an astonishingly high success rate for an intervention as easy as sleep deprivation. There's also the hope of a sort of "learning effect": Chronically depressed people sometimes don't even know/remember the experience of normal or positive mood. Even short-lived fixes could allow them to find a way to better cope with the disease.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

scythe 9y ago

There's a danger in tabbing back to the comments page after the third paragraph. A few paragraphs lower, you would have seen this: >So he and his colleagues turned to the scientific literature for ideas. A handful of American studies had suggested that lithium might prolong the effect of sleep deprivation, so they investigated that. They found that 65% of patients taking lithium showed a sustained response to sleep deprivation when assessed after three months, compared to just 10% of those not taking the drug.

blueprint 9y ago
wow that's so much better
hateduser2 9y ago
Sustained sleep deprivation by lithium doesn’t sound any better than sleep deprivation by literal lack of sleep.
aidenn0 9y ago
too bad lithium is such a hard drug to administer (it's psychoactive at doses very close to harmful doses, so usually there needs to be monitoring of the levels of lithium in the blood)
- mislankanova 9y ago
  Long term use of lithium may also lead to kidney problems[1][2]. Monitoring of kidney function is also needed over a long time[3]. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25735990/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25735990/ [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0085253815326089 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S008525381... [3]https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/bipolar-disorder/treatment/#lithium-carbonate https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/bipolar-disorder/treatment/#li...
- noir_lord 9y ago
  My mother has bipolar and takes lithium, it's scary stuff, the effective dose is so close to the toxicity dose that she has has to get her bloods checked every couple of weeks. The stuff works for her though, well enough that she sometimes feels she doesn't need it because she's OK, historically things have gone bad when that happens. Scary disease especially as they still unsure of the cause, we took part in a medical study 20ish years ago as they wanted siblings with a parent with bipolar so they could look for genetic causes/pre-dispositions.
kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
Sounds like: - induce mania by sleep deprivation - take lithium to counteract the mania

matt4077 9y ago

5% not relapsing is actually more than I would have expected, and an astonishingly high success rate for an intervention as easy as sleep deprivation. There's also the hope of a sort of "learning effect": Chronically depressed people sometimes don't even know/remember the experience of normal or positive mood. Even short-lived fixes could allow them to find a way to better cope with the disease.