ANXIETY MEDICATIONS ATIVAN, XANAX, AND VALIUM MAY INCREASE RISK OF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
ANXIETY MEDICATIONS ATIVAN, XANAX, AND VALIUM MAY INCREASE RISK OF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
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September 15th, 2014 at 5:54PM
My wife’s family has and has had a great of AD, so we read everything we can. As far as I understand it:
1 The studies show an association which might mean (a) that valium (and chemical cousins) by itself, or in combination with other factors, can cause AD at some level of use (b) that many people who are developing AD develop anxiety and so seek out anti anxiety drugs i.e. AD causes valium use or (c) possibly something else.
2. I’ve had difficulty, at a low level of effort, pinning down the dosages involved in the studies. My best read/guess is that those studied were taking 3-5 milligrams of, say, Ativan a day for weeks at a time for constant anxiety, as opposed, for example, to an occasional .5 – .75 milligrams for sleep after a very stressful day or at night before anticipated stress. That is a lot of difference. As we know quantity often makes the safe and desirable into the dangerous. I’d be interested if anyone else knows about the length of treatment and dosages involved.
There is so much balancing of opposing
factors, and wild guess work, involved in deciding how to deal with health. See Woody Allen’s futuristic “Sleeper” in which everything earlier thought not healthy turned out, in the future, not to be so and vice versa. Reading the Times recently I have many times been reminded of this: eg. eggs.
Right now: I’m going to have beer.
September 15th, 2014 at 10:12PM
These pills allow you anxious quakers
To hide that you are inner shakers.
The Xanax will calm you,
Don’t let them alarm you –
See you soon in Alzheimer’s Acres.
September 16th, 2014 at 6:27AM
Greg, according to local lore in my area, some physicians in the 1970s and 1980s prescribed Valium as long-term maintenance meds for factory workers suffering “nerves”. General Motors workers, with extremely lush health insurance at the time, are the ones routinely mentioned. (This story is commonly believed, but I don’t know if there’s truth behind it.)
September 16th, 2014 at 9:18AM
In the Kidz in the Hall film “Brain Candy,” a sleazy pharmaceutical company is making tons of money selling a new drug that cures depression. When it turns out that users eventually become comatose, the company’s response is to open a chain of for-profit “comatoriums.” Problem solved!
September 16th, 2014 at 10:14AM
Dr_Doctorstein: Comatorium! Love it.
September 16th, 2014 at 11:30AM
It has the ring of Obitarium, which was one of Jack Kevorkian’s nuttier ideas.
September 16th, 2014 at 12:03PM
Valium is the “mother’s little helper” that Mick Jagger was singing about way back when. My mom and (I am pretty sure) about half the other moms on our middle-middle-class block took it at one point or another. Its popularity seems to have declined in the mid-1970s.