Monday, November 19, 2007

Vote On The New Sidebar Poll!

What's your favorite anti-psychotic agent? I'm collecting more useless data.

7 comments:

Midwife with a Knife said...

I'm commenting here in response to the question from the anon person under the sleep thingy.

I voted for haldol, and simply because we have a reasonable amount of experience with it in pregnancy, and it seems to be a safe choice (with respect to fetal effects). I also use it for hyperemesis when nothing else will touch it, and it seems to work well for some people for that, too.

Geodon, risperdol, etc are all PROBABLY ok, but they're newer. I guess I have the obstetricians bias towards older drugs.

Anonymous said...

I kind of suspected Haldol was selected by a health care professional. I just couldn't see too many patients voting for Vitamin H.

Audrey

Catherine said...

I usually vote, but I think I am going to abstain from this one. None of them are really my "favorites" if you know what I mean.

Anonymous said...

Having taken Haldol I actually prefer it to the atypicals and the enormous weight gain. Never gained an ounce on the other stuff. My doc will not precribe it because of possible T.D.

Midwife with a Knife said...

audrey: It's all a matter of perspective. Most women are willing to tolerate some side effects for a medicine that I can tell them has been used for decades in pregnancy and we have no evidence of fetal effects vs others (particularly the newer atypicals) that while we don't have any reason to think they will hurt their baby, we can't exclude the possibility that we'll find out something bad was going on in 5-20 years.

It's all a question of risk vs benefit, but I can't completely rule out risk (for any medicine capable of crossing the placenta... those that can't cross are completely different) until the fetuses exposed to drugs in utero grow up.

NeoNurseChic said...

Once again, the only experience I have with antipsychotics is through their prevention/abortive use for migraine and other headache types. I voted for zyprexa, but thorazine actually also is a favorite of mine as it does help with both migraine and cluster, even though the side effects are pretty awful. Can't personally vote for haldol as it gave me an anaphylactic reaction 3 times before the docs knew for sure what was doing it! Kinda scary...

The one time I did have what was diagnosed as psychosis NOS (but really was more delirium from the anticholinergic toxicity), they didn't give me meds - just let my body ride it out. Fortunately I always came out of it, even though the longest it took was about 4 days to come out of it (for them to realize it and stop the anticholinergic meds!), but the worst time of it lasted 8 hours and I was much more far gone than the 4 days time! haha...

In terms of pregnancy and migraine, one of the meds that is okay to take during pregnancy (according to my neuro's NP) is compazine. Is this ever used as an antipsychotic? I imagine that one day when I become pregnant, I may rely on compazine as I'll have to come off all of my current concoctions, and while inderal is also considered okay during pregnancy, it does nothing for me. Jason thinks I'll have to stop working (or seriously cut back) when pregnant due to having to go off the majority of my meds, but I don't know - I would hope to remain at least somewhat functional, although it'll definitely be difficult. I will always have to plan my pregnancies in order to adequately clear my system of all the meds I'm on now that would be harmful to a fetus.

OT of the poll really, but the above discussion referred to antipsychotics in pregnancy, so I felt I could chime in on that topic!

Oh...so fave antipsychotics for headache are zyprexa, thorazine, haldol (but not for me), geodon, abilify, and I believe there are a few others, but those are the main ones I can think of. The only one I haven't tried is abilify, which is used preventatively and may be something for me to consider at some point. There are very few meds I haven't tried yet, but that is one of them!

Take care,
Carrie :)

word verification: wtrboyf (Water Boy Fred?) hehe

Anonymous said...

Hmm, looks like Seroquel is way in the lead. Is that because of a lot of people taking it at super low doses for sleep and anxiety, I wonder?

Zyprexa gets such a bad rap because of the weight/diabetes thing and Lilly's sleaziness about it, etc. (News flash: Seroquel can also cause weight gain and diabetes...) But it WORKS. Really well. And fast. So Zyprexa's getting my vote. I think the stuff is great. BTW, I'm a patient.