Volunteer dead after clinical mood drug trail
Drug trail for mood drug hospitalizes five patients three of which have irreversible brain damage and one death has been reported.
Cases of early-stage clinical trials going badly wrong are rare and it is not yet known what caused this tragedy, with a drug intended to treat mood and anxiety issues as well as movement coordination disorders.
There are no "safe" psychiatric drugs. Each has numerous harmful short term and largely unknown long term effects. Each psychiatric drug which was originally heralded as the new "safe" wonder drug, was found to have severe harmful side effects, including addiction, and withdrawal symptoms, among others. Psychiatric drugs obtain their result by causing brain dysfunction. more from encognitive.com
Cognitive Impairment and Long-Term Damage of Benzodiazepines
The many papers published in the 1960s and early to mid 1970s on this subject were largely single dose therapeutic dose studies or low-dose studies for periods of a few weeks. They showed a range of deficits in cognitive function, psychomotor performance and short-term memory problems with no development of tolerance. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s (when therapeutic dose dependency was belatedly accepted), that cognitive function and other tests on long-term benzodiazepine users (up to 10 years) were studied both during use and in acute withdrawals. From the mid 1980s to mid 1990s there was an increasing number of studies looking at damage after long-term use and at follow-up periods after discontinuation of up to six years. Several of these studies involve CT scans of the brain looking for structural changes.
Summary
Benzodiazepines produce impairment of cognitive functioning and psychomotor performance e.g. reaction time, vigilance, arousal, judgement, reasoning, speed and accuracy of information processing, visual spatial ability, co-ordination, short-term and post drug long-term memory, 'blackouts' and learned tasks.
These effects are independent of abuse, dependency, non-dependency, normal, healthy, young or old subjects. Impairment increases with chronic use. Development of tolerance to these effects is very slow.
CT brain scans show a difference in ventricular cerebral spinal fluid space dimensions between benzodiazepine users and non-users, and also between high and low benzodiazepine users.
The functional brain damage causes increased morbidity, increased mortality and social deterioration.
Subjects are generally not aware of their reduced capacity or the fact that they are not functioning well in every day life.
In general much of the impairment is slowly reversible. Some aspects show improvement after six years, some are semi-permanent or permanent. More from benzo.org
