is zyprexa/olanzapine bad for your brain?

[trainman04]

''Monkeys treated with haloperidol and olanzapine for 17 to 27 months lost roughly 10% of their total brain volume, both gray and white matter, compared with sham-treated controls, with greatest volume loss in frontal and parietal cortex.3''

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/schizophrenia/antipsychotics-and-shrinking-brain

Is this bad? In this study, both an older neuroleptic (Haldol or ?haloperidol?) and a newer atypical neuroleptic (Zyprexa or ?olanzapine?) caused significant shrinkage in the higher level parts of the brains in monkeys.

I'm taking zyprexa for my anxiety and it's working great the only side effects I have are weight gain but I don't care but is the brain shrinkage something I should worry about? does that mean I'm becoming dumber?

same question for Valproate/valproic acid I read it decreases amygdala volume could it possibly reduce other regions of the brain??

 

[dopamimetic]

Question might be just how bad it is, and if in a given case leaving the underlying disorder untreated might be worse ... but yeah to me, as a layman, brain shrinkage & tardive dyskinesia (seen people suffering from that) & just how it feels subjectively to be on dopamine antagonists, all the akathisia, dysphoria, rigidness etc... it didn't exactly feel healthy and haloperidol/high-dose quetiapine were anxiety-inducing, risperidone was pro-psychotic. Certainly worse than using NMDA antags, and they have all sort of weird speculated side effects, but that's just me.

Need to say that I've seen other people for which dopa antags were absolute life savers too, and many which didn't show such pronounced aversion or adverse effects.

Don't know whether it's possible to apply some brain volume to intelligence ratio, I guess not directly but well you're right into that you probably don't want to loose brain mass.

Good question about valproate / antiepileptics in general, AFAIR valproate has more a problem with making the bones vulnerable due to inhibiting some enzyme (HDAC?which also happens to give it other outstanding propertues like re-open critical period learning of absolute pitch and it appears to rather induce neurotrophic factors like BDNF etc. ... but anti-epileptics usually are also anxiolytics and do possess some anti-psychotic properties too, so ...

 

[sekio]

Monkeys treated with haloperidol and olanzapine

So, both drugs at once? Haldol is bad enough, it made me chemically immobilized the time they gave it to me in the hospital psych ward, I can't imagine taking it continuously for months and months, much less combining further neuroleptics in the mix. And the monkeys probably weren't getting a lot of psychological stimulation. Not really a suprise that there was a reuction in brain volume.

If you are just taking olanzapine you should be fine, doubly so if you stay psychologically active.

 

[dopamimetic]

I got prescribed Olanzapine because I had problem sleeping. Yea, you read it right.

They do it all the time, it's similar here too with antipsychotics being thrown around like candy ... yet one has to jump through hoops in order to get simple off-label prescriptions like for memantine (or, as of recently, even benzodiazepines when you happen to have some sort of substance disorder in history [or not, it depends] and just need something against anxiety) and while more rare things like e.g. riluzole appear to be completely out of reach. They do just anything to keep remembering us we're not patients of age by any means, and that (un)holy war on drugs does add its own weight.

Olanzapine is subtle, causes dissociation and very confusion in the head

Dissociation, indeed? Guess not "my" kind of it, though