Tag: pharmaceuticals

Pain, ADHD, and happiness

I jokingly referred to pain-induced ADD on Monday, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that is actually what was happening.  After prior surgeries I was too exhausted to notice anything, but this time I was energetic enough to experience the pain.  I mean, unless I tried to go outside or something.  That led to a really entertaining systems crash in the supermarket.  But if I stayed inside I was able to do things like get food and put away dishes without strain.  Contrast with when my pain meds sabotaged my cortisol production.  Intellectually I was there and able to do things like read and blog, but physically it was a struggle to make myself a smoothie.

After surgery I could not read or write or even enjoy a movie.  It was more than pain making everything 70% less fun, it was that everything was annoying and frustrating and no fun at all.  I couldn’t enter a state of flow or concentration or even relaxing for any length of time.  Except when I played video games or the piano.  Neither were fun, exactly, and I was still in pain, but they were at least distracting and rewarding.  Looking back, this explains a lot of my behavior when I was in constant pain last year, it just took being out of pain and then very sharply in a lot of pain to make the pattern obvious.

At first I thought this was  Harrison Bergeron type thing, where pain was sending out interrupts too often for me to get into a groove on anything.  But then I read this blog post (blogs were just about in my power) by Sara Constantin on dopamine, explaining Peter Redgrave’s hypothesis that the spike (phasic increase) of dopamine is not itself a reward (which is how pop journalism usually describes it) but a timestamp that lets you know what actions should get credit for the actual reward chemicals you are about to receive.  That would explain why humans and animals with broken dopamine systems do feel pleasure when eating but will nonetheless starve to death unless you put the food directly in their mouth.

Many of the drugs used to treat ADHD inhibit dopamine reuptake, which raises your tonic (baseline) dopamine levels.  Constantin hypothesizes that if the baseline is too low than stimuli that should be ignored suddenly are interpreted as important, leading to a lot of SQUIRREL.

[ I was going to make this a gif but putting unpausable moving pictures in a post on ADHD just seemed cruel]

If this is correct, it offers an explanation for why ADHDers are so drawn to things like videogames and sex:  the time gap between doing the correct thing and getting the chemical reward is so short they can still determine causality, even against the a background of SQUIRRELs.  This needn’t be purely about hedonism- if it was, something consistently pleasant would work.  I think it’s about having an internal locus of control and self-efficancy.  Humans are happiest they feel like they have the power to change their own circumstances and have an impact on the world.  It’s hard to feel those things if your attention is constantly being torn away from what you choose and you can’t (on a neural level) determine what made you feel the emotion you are currently feeling.  This is one reason the toll of ADHD shouldn’t be measured in lost productivity alone; even people with very successful coping mechanisms are being denied that internal locus of control, and that’s miserable.

Here’s my contribution: my description of being in pain sounds a lot like other people’s description of ADHD, right down to video games being rewarding without strictly being fun.  And as it turns out the basal ganglion, the area Redgrave believes is using dopamine to timestamp causes so they can be matched with effects, also releases dopamine in response to pain.  It seems entirely possible to me that high baseline levels of dopamine could diminish the effect of a spike.  Instead of everything being timestamped “good job”, nothing is, with similar results

But let’s make it even more interesting.  Several anti-depressants are also useful in treating chronic pain, and NSAIDS (usually mild pain killers) treat depression.  I had previously put this down to “pain is depressing”, “depression appears to be connected to inflammation in ways we don’t understand” and plain old “brains are squishy and they don’t make sense”, but if there was a causal link?  The symptoms of depression include fatigue, feelings of helplessness and lost of interest or enjoyment of previously liked activities, which sure sounds related.  Quick googling found a very tiny study showing a connection between low dopamine and suicide, and this fascinating study suggesting that inflammation reduced the basal ganglia’s production of dopamine, which would tie all of this up in a very pretty bow.  Something causes pain and/or inflammation (the two often go together), which long term causes inflammation in the basal ganglia, which causes depression and reduces your body’s natural analgesics.

Look body, if you were worried about us getting high off of pain, maybe you could have releases fewer happy chemicals in response to pain, instead of making it just as fun but also cause depression some time later.

This would also explain why ADHD medicines are promising in treating depression (source, source, and a large showing among my friends), and why ADHD and depression so often go together.*

I cannot stress enough how unqualified I am to make this hypothesis.  Lots of people know lots more on all of these things than me.  But it comes together to be an extremely plausible explanation for both the literature I’ve read and my personal experiences.

*There’s a lot of evidence that depressed parents correlate with ADHD kids, but it’s probably environmental.

Selling Sickness: Depression and Anxiety

Previous: Aceso Under Glass Valentine’s Day Special

Like many people, the authors of Selling Sickness believe that drugs for depression and anxiety are over-prescribed, that they are used to escape everyday emotions, and that this is terrible.  Again, I wish they’d defined their terms better.

For example, it sounds ridiculous to give someone Prozac because they’re sad their mom died.  That sadness is categorized as natural and healthy, in fact barring very unusual circumstances it would be viewed as sick not to feel sad at that point.  But you only get anti-depressants for “being sad” if it lasts more than two years.  Until then, anti-depressants are given only when negative emotions* start destroying a person’s ability to run their own life, and thus become self-reinforcing.  It’s completely natural and healthy to still be morning your mom’s death two months later, but if you’re unable to shower or eat for that length of time it doesn’t matter that the depression has an obvious external cause, it’s hurting you and there shouldn’t be any shame in accepting medical treatment for that.

A common fear I hear around anti-depressants is that they make people tolerate situations which should be depressing, and thus impede their exit.  That’s a real concern, and I think we should watch for it.  On the other hand, there are lots of people who want to leave but are unable to do so because they’re so depressed, and anti-depressants give them the activation energy and hope in the future that lets them leave.  And the same drug can have both effects in different people, or even the same drug at different times, because humans are weird and we don’t understand what we’re doing.

“We don’t understand what we’re doing” is not a great endorsement for something that’s screwing with the chemicals inside your brain.  I do think we need to use caution, that the risks are poorly understood, especially by GPs, and that nutrition and exercise are underutilized as treatments.  I also think that even when anti-depressants are the best individual decision, mass use of them can indicate a problem (I’ve heard 50% among PhD students, which cannot be okay).  And there will always be room for debate- should you be expected to work productively a month into grieving?  To work in a really difficult, dehumanizing office environment?  Would you need anti-depressants to take care of your kids if you had better community support?

But big pharma is not the one creating those societal conditions, and destigmatizing mental illness because it benefits them financially seems like a success story to me.  If we’re going to counter over prescribing let’s look closer to the problem (doctors) or further away (societal structure), not question the people receiving needed help.

*Not necessarily sadness.  In fact in men depression often manifests as anger, which leads to under-diagnosis.

Aceso Under Glass Valentine’s Day Special

My original plan was to finish Selling Sickness and write an overall book review, but I have reached that stage where I can’t continue reading it until I get some of my current thoughts out of my head, so we’ll be doing this in stages.

There exist many, many criticisms of the pharmacutical industry, all of which I dislike for framing it as the fault of the pharmaceutical companies and not the FDA.  If you want to learn more about this, Bad Pharma is a good source.  Selling Sickness‘s is more specifically about claim is that pharmaceutical companies deliberately manipulate both the public’s and the medical field’s view of illnesses, and “defines health people as sick” for their financial benefit.

I really, really wish Selling Sickness had defined its terms better.  Let’s use heart attacks as an example, because it is Valentine’s day.  No one questions that heart attacks are extremely bad, that they are associated with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and that giving medications that lower blood and cholesterol to people who have already had a heart attack lowers the chance of a second one and increase life expectancy.  From this some people concluded that high blood pressure and cholesterol cause heart attacks, and we should lower them with drugs even in people who have never had a heart attack.  Selling Sickness describes that as turning healthy people into sick people.

Let me say out several different possibilities that would account for all available information:

  1. High blood pressure and/or high cholesterol damage your coronary system, causing heart attacks.
  2. Sufficiently high blood pressure and/or high cholesterol damage your coronary system, causing heart attacks, but we have drawn the cut off in the wrong place.
  3. High blood pressure and/or high cholesterol damage your coronary system, causing heart attacks, if and only if you have already had a heart attack.
  4. High blood pressure and/or high cholesterol and heart attacks share a root cause, the common treatments treat that cause, and the indicator numbers go down as a result.
  5. High blood pressure and/or high cholesterol and heart attacks share a root cause, the common treatments treat only the symptoms and leave the chance of a first heart attack unchanged, but coincidentally help after a heart attack.
  6. There are multiple causes of high blood pressure and high cholesterol have multiple causes, one of which also causes heart attacks.  Drugs happen to attack root cause if you have it, lower blood pressure and cholesterol to no effect if you do not.
  7. High blood pressure and/or high cholesterol damage your coronary system only in conjunction with an unidentified third factor, and so drugs reduce lifetime mortality if and only if you have that factor.  People who have a heart attack have that factor by definition and thus benefit from blood pressure/cholesterol medications.  They would benefit from them before their heart attack as well, but we have no way to identify them ahead of time.

Under which of these scenarios would you call someone with high blood pressure sick?  It’s a trick question because sick and healthy aren’t actually medical terms. The term for something given to an asymptomatic person that keeps them from developing symptoms in the future isn’t “making them sick”, it’s  “preventative medicine”, and it’s generally considered a good thing.

If high blood pressure and cholesterol don’t immediately cause symptoms but do damage your coronary system, taking drugs to combat them is a good call (dependent on side effects).   You could call them sick or not, it doesn’t matter.  If there was a pill that kept you at your physical and mental peak for 100 years you’d take it, even if your only health condition is being mortal.  Or maybe high blood pressure/cholesterol does indicate illness, but for one of the reasons outlined above, medication helps the numbers without improving symptoms or outcomes.  Then you’re sick but shouldn’t take medicine.  How useful medicine is has nothing to do with the English words “sick” and “healthy'”.

To be fair, researchers make the same mistake.  What we ultimately care about is if medication improves an individuals quality and quantity of life (with exact weightings dependent on the individual).  That takes a long time to do because people take forever to die.  You only get 20 years total from when you first register the molecule.  For a drug intended to prolong life given to people in their 50s, the drug could go off patent (destroying any ability to recoup the cost of the trials) before it got out of trials.   Even waiting for heart attacks takes a very long time and a very large sample size,because heart attacks aren’t actually that common.  So researchers use proxy measures like high blood pressure and cholesterol, on the assumption that anything that lowers those must prevent heart attacks.  Even researchers who aren’t trying to recoup financial costs do this, because they would like to produce results some time before they retire.  The problem is that even if high blood pressure and cholesterol are tightly coupled with heart attacks, this method will inevitably over-include things that somehow affect the proxy measures without affecting heart attacks, and miss things that decrease heart attacks or lifespan without affecting the proxy numbers.  And of course it’s entirely possible the FDA let pharma companies nudge the cut offs for treatment much lower than they should be, because that’s easy.

So yes, there are a lot or problems with aggressively treating proxy numbers, but “applying the sick label to healthy people” isn’t one of them.