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How long does it take at MOST for serotonin to regenerate?

VincentOnE

Bluelighter
Joined
Sep 11, 2009
Messages
647
Why is 2 weeks to a month common for serotonin regenerate?
Why not shorter/longer?

What exactly affects the time differences? (Genetics, food, mdma usage etc)
 
Well first of all, I think you're taking an incorrect approach to the idea of seratonin regeneration or whatever. While it's a pretty viable theory, I think the reason most people recommend to take at least a month break between rolls is that this kind of schedule helps you avoid the negative side effects of MDMA use. No one really conducted detailed experiments to evaluate the exact correlation between seratonin levels, frequency of MDMA use and negative side effects of MDMA use. Do you see what I am getting at?

To answer you initial question. The reason that seratonin takes a relatively long amount to regenerate is that it takes several stages for your body to convert basic nutritional building blocks into seratonin. So you body has to do something like this:

Basic nutritional block > Substance A > ... > Substance X > 5HTP > Seratonin

The whole idea behind postloading on 5HTP is that it allows your body to skip all the other conversions except for the last one. So in theory this should allow your body to more quickly make new seratonin to reduce your seratonin deficiency.

The normal conversation process from nutritional building blocks to seratonin just takes something like 4 weeks. Not much else to say. :) I would also say that food as such probably doesn't have too big of an impact on the whole seratonin regeneration process.

Does this make sense?
 
Well first of all, I think you're taking an incorrect approach to the idea of seratonin regeneration or whatever. While it's a pretty viable theory, I think the reason most people recommend to take at least a month break between rolls is that this kind of schedule helps you avoid the negative side effects of MDMA use. No one really conducted detailed experiments to evaluate the exact correlation between seratonin levels, frequency of MDMA use and negative side effects of MDMA use. Do you see what I am getting at?

To answer you initial question. The reason that seratonin takes a relatively long amount to regenerate is that it takes several stages for your body to convert basic nutritional building blocks into seratonin. So you body has to do something like this:

Basic nutritional block > Substance A > ... > Substance X > 5HTP > Seratonin

The whole idea behind postloading on 5HTP is that it allows your body to skip all the other conversions except for the last one. So in theory this should allow your body to more quickly make new seratonin to reduce your seratonin deficiency.

The normal conversation process from nutritional building blocks to seratonin just takes something like 4 weeks. Not much else to say. :) I would also say that food as such probably doesn't have too big of an impact on the whole seratonin regeneration process.

Does this make sense?
It makes complete sense.


"No one really conducted detailed experiments to evaluate the exact correlation between seratonin levels, frequency of MDMA use and negative side effects of MDMA use. "

Are you saying that there's no "safe time" in which you can wait, to be completely sure that your serotonin has completely regenerated?
 
what i think he's saying is that no one knows how long, or if it completely regenerates.
just dont be stupid and you wont has problems methinks
 
No one knows exact answer, to have a huge portion of your serotonin stores replenished i think it would take near the 3 month mark. Who knows if your still missing 5% - 10% at that point, which you probably are.
And your asking this question because obviously its mdma related, so you have to know that its not just serotonin you look at. It's serotonin receptors that down regulate after each mdma use, and it takes a bit for those to come back up.
There are other complex aspects of it as well, bottom line the more you wait the better your roll. Also the more you wait, the less damage that occurs. Win win all day
 
Part of waiting over a month to roll isn't just serotonin regeneration, it's to allow your 5HT receptors to recover from working so hard all at once. Forcing them to work so often eventually kills off those receptors and can take a long time to allow them to regenerate.

But to answer your basic question, I think that diet has a lot to do with how quickly your body can regenerate serotonin. If you are giving your body the nutrients to allow those conversions, it won't take as long as if you ate Taco Bell and Doritos every day.
 
it takes months to regenerate. why do you think you hear stories about people who do it month to month saying they feel like they have less of a brain each time they do it because they don't wait long enough to regenerate. 3-5 months is a good amount of time between usage.,
 
In Alberta public schools, it's taught that it takes seven years to restore the neurotransmitters for serotonin every time they are used and broken down. I'm very much unsure of that and can't find anything to cite yet, but here's some information you should find useful about how to replenish it and rebalance your system after depleting it: http://www.drkaslow.com/html/neurotransmitter_repletion.html

I don't "use", but I found this forum while looking up info on repleneshing other neurotransmitters for an argument and thought this info link might help someone. Be well, we're all in this world together-
 
http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih2/addiction/guide/lesson4-1.htm
fig4-2.jpg
 
Those photos seem to be from the oft-ridiculed Ricaurte study... probably not relevant to human use.
 
^ unfortunately Mdma has neger been properly studied :(

Those pictures are the best visual reference we have atm... sorry :\
 
Those pictures are the best visual reference we have atm... sorry :\

So you decided to fuel the (heavily denied) ED scaremongering by showing a quite scary picture from a discredited study which did not even cover MDMA.


Why?

If it had not been for someone else highlighting this fact the OP would be thinking MDMA will cause the irreversible damage shown in those pictures.......what will he be thinking post MDMA use.........cue Post on this forum saying "I think I have caused brain damage"

This is meant to be a harm reduction forum, not a mis-information campaign.
 
It took a year and a bit to recover from heavy e use. I went back to normal.
 
Why is 2 weeks to a month common for serotonin regenerate?
Why not shorter/longer?
What exactly affects the time differences? (Genetics, food, mdma usage etc)

Dancesafe has a pretty good article on this, including this graph. Their answer is that your serotonin receptors become "less sensitive" in response to being flooded by MDMA. It takes at least a week to get some decent sensitivity back and even at day 21, the sensitivity is not 100%.

This probably is the reason for the "once a month" mantra, it's a pretty good estimate on how long it takes to gain full affects.

From the other end, the general consensus seems to be that recreational level MDMA is not *permanently* neurotoxic, however, there will be some temporary loss of SERT function (the fine details however are under considerable debate). Recovery time would depend on how much MDMA was used. I could easily see full recovery extending into years for some very heavy MDMA users. The "roll once every few months or so" crowd might not notice any changes at all.
 
+1 for the Dancesafe reference, i'd forgotten what a great resource they are. :)
 
Dancesafe relies on one of the much-ridiculed Ricaurte articles, making them a questionable resource imo.

The picture you see there is from monkeys which were given 5mg/kg racemic MDMA hydrochloride, injected subcutaneously twice daily. that's a lot of MDMA. plus ricaurte is lol anyways cause there's his later "MDMA" study (which appeared in Science but was later retracted) in which they--supposedly accidentally--administered meth instead of MDMA.

^ EVERY TIME a study is brought up around here, it is immediately discredited using Ricaurtes's. You think EVERY study since the 90s has been based off of that ONE study? The study that was retracted from the scientific community and brought Ricaurte much public humiliation? That's ridiculous, I don't know why you would think you know more about that study than a scientist who would base his life's work on that kind of thing.


I looked through the study E Tarded mentioned.. there was not one single mention of Ricaurte, there was no source for his study and his awful ideology had nothing to do with what was in that article.



Since you're so worried that it is only meth causing these problems (based on one small study that was retracted 10+ years ago).. how would you explain this then?
http://www.utoledo.edu/med/depts/neurosciences/images/MDMA-METH-Cox.GIF

That CLEARLY shows that MDMA and metamphetamine cause almost equal "damage" to the brain, they actually lower the amount of oxygen rich blood that is in your brain causing a wide variety of other side effects that change from person to person.. the point is though the two drugs can cause similar damage and just because ONE SINGLE study was fucked up YEARS AGO does not mean every study since then has been 100% wrong. That's simply preposterous.



Here is another picture that does a great job of showing that it can take quite some time for receptor regeneration to begin:
http://newrelevant.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ecstacy-300x177.jpg
 
C'mon Folley, you can do better than that!

The "study" that E Tarded mentioned was a lesson plan for teachers to tell their students how bad Ecstasy is, and it says this, right under the photo:

Figure 4.2: Photographs of serotonin axons in the cerebral cortex of nonhuman primates labeled with a fluorescent marker. The number of serotonin-labeled axons is dramatically reduced in the cerebral cortex at 2 weeks (B) and 18 months (C) after the last drug exposure. The brain of the control animal that did not receive MDMA (A) shows the dense network of labeled axons. Images E and F show changes caused by MDMA use on a different brain region, the hypothalamus. The control showing the hypothalamus in the absence of MDMA is shown in D. Photographs courtesy of G.A. Ricaurte, with the permission of the Journal of Neuroscience.

I should correct myself. It appears this image is NOT from the study which Ricaurte et. al retracted, but from an earlier one. It's safe to say that MDMA was used here, though if I am not mistaken it was used on monkeys at doses so high that their relevance to normal human use is questionable (see below.)

The first image you provided seems to be from here, where there's not much information about it, but if the study that produced that image was anything like this one by the same guy,, it involved giving rats doses of around 40 mg/kg, while Erowid recommends 2 mg/kg for humans.

Your second image seems to be from here, where Ricaurte is clearly credited and there is a link to this article. It suggests that the 7-year image and the 18-month image Etarded provided are related. The page the image came from says:

Ricaurte compared the data from monkeys who were given ecstasy dissolved in a liquid twice a day for four days to other monkeys who received the same liquid WITHOUT the ecstasy twice a day for four days.

Now, that doesn't tell us exactly how much MDMA he gave the monkeys, but it sounds like an awful lot.

Aha! I found the study! It says in the methods section:

Racemic MDMA hydrochloride, dissolved in a sterile 0.9% sodium chloride solution, was injected subcutaneously at a dose of 5 mg/kg twice daily (9 A.M. and 5 P.M.) for 4 consecutive days.

Again, that's 40 mg/kg over 4 days, while most of us recommend only about 2 mg/kg per month. This is why I think it's very hard to extrapolate from Ricaurte's work to normal human use.

There are at least a few perfectly good studies on MDMA out there, I'll see if I can find an example. Unfortunately, it seems that there simply aren't many images of the effects of MDMA on the brain from reliable sources.
 
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