How can anticholinergics cause delirium ?

[Kdem]

As a general question. Not about me.

As for me personally, I have encountered a few very minor delirium-like effects on promethazine. That was years ago.

And I'd be curious to know what blocking (by means of a drug) excess acetylcholine (OK, oversimplification!) caused by GABAergic withdrawal would do. I'm sure it would have effects on other neurotransmitters.

 

[sekio]

Acetylcholine is important in the regulation of conciousness. I can't elaborate much more but because it's so broad and important in its activity in the body as a stimulatory neurotransmitter it really doesn't suprise me that too much, or too little, will mess with conciousness in a bad way.

I've read that sarin is not fun either!

 

[JK25]

As a general question. Not about me.

As for me personally, I have encountered a few very minor delirium-like effects on promethazine. That was years ago.

And I'd be curious to know what blocking (by means of a drug) excess acetylcholine (OK, oversimplification!) caused by GABAergic withdrawal would do. I'm sure it would have effects on other neurotransmitters.

It is weird acetylcholine is the medical E.R. standard for a case of Cocaine overdose.

It functions as a neurotransmitter as well as a neuromodulator and in its natural state has a cholinergic effect.

When something is taken that causes acetylcholine antagonism then anticholinergic action becomes present. It dries up muscaric preductors and when that happens you become dehydrated.

So one of the reasons (and surely there are many, many more physiological reasons) it makes you delirious is when you take something like Datura Stramonium or too much Cyclizine HCL the brain gets into a delirious state because of inter-neural dehydration. You are tripping off your body trying to regulate and re-appropriate the fluid available to sustain a bio-chemical and electrolite balance or is trying to keep a state which promotes the electro-chemical firing of neurotransmitters active to keep it going.

Well I know this is the case for Datura (Jimson Weed) and Cyclizine HCL. What else is involved and what the exact pharmacokinetics other substances have on acetylcholine and muscaric sites I haven't read up at all up to now.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

Anticholinesterase poisoning is the pits. Got 'gotten' by a plant extract, a long time ago, and from the effects, it had to have been. Not dissimilar to a widow spider bite (alpha-latrotoxin, on the other hand acts by forcing the synapses to dump their stores without blockade of degradation). Feels like getting swatted with a man-size lead block from a great height. Good look trying to walk, or piss the next few days (in the case of an inhibitor). Despite the increased urination, good luck with the getting TO somewhere to get rid of it, feeling like you just aged 90 years AND took a vicious beating both at once)

Oddly enough it felt like it had something in common with opioid withdrawal. Neither experience were much fun. Don't blame the spider though, I'd be pissy if I'd just had to lay eggs. In subtoxic doses though ACh inhibition doesn't subjectively seem, in my experience to feel unpleasant, unless you get to gut-buster territory. (observations on taking huperzine-A and galantamine)