Abilify, headaches, and brain shrinkage

Hello!

I've been on Abilify for a year and a half now. It is the only thing that keeps me stable. Lately though I've been having intense headaches that last for days at a time. They come and go, but when they're on, they're really on. It knocks me off my feet. I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced these headaches while taking Abilify.

I've also heard that this medication can cause the brain to shrink. Does anyone have any links to studies or reports about this? I'm curious as to whether or not the headaches could be caused by this phenomenon.

I'm not sure abilify has been shown to cause brain shrinkage albeit some of the other antipsychotics have been. The brain shrinkage hasn't been shown to cause headaches to my knowledge. I was on abilify for 2 years and had no headaches.

Idk which AP my aunt was on (longterm I'm sure more than a year) and she started suffering severe headaches and her memory was getting worse. The pain was severe and consistant enough to send her to a GP who referred her to a specialist after his treatments failed to alleviate her symptoms.

Turns out Brain Atrophy is real, she lost a significant amount of brain mass... To add insult to injury, this was 2 years before those articles and studies were released so one of the Dr's actually accused her of abusing illicit street drugs.

That being said, idk if Abilify is one of the culprits, I read the article here on PC last year about AP's and Brain Atrophy and don't remember if they mentioned Abilify.
You can check the link below...

http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/09...ics/59443.html

http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/arti...ticleid=211084
This is one of the key studies but it doesn't consider abilify independently despite its different mechanism of action...

This study clustered the APs and the best known animal studies use haldol and zyprexa. Abilify activates rather than blocks dopamine so I think it's fair to say nothing is known about its relation to damage...

Is brain tissue loss reversible? Do Geodon and thorazine cause brain tissue loss too?

Abilify is the purest of all the anti psychotics, the crisis team Dr tried to tell me it doesn't work because of that, my Dr obviously doesn't agree because she just let me start taking it again.

Don't stress abilify is the safest.

Abilify was a nightmare for me. I got muscle stiffness/dystonia even with Cogentin, it made me super tired, gave me a bad tremor, akathisia, and actually made me depressed. And it didn't even work because I still had bad breakthrough hallucinations.

In terms of side effects and effectiveness, I'd say thorazine has been the best for me. I don't need a lot of it to work and it doesn't make me gain weight, have muscle stiffness, tremor, etc. and it doesn't even make me tired. However it does give me galactorrhea, which should be a deal breaker, but I'd pick that over akathisia any day...

I've never seen a study where people on long term APs get off the meds and are studied so I'm going to go with not studied. Taking people off APs has been hard with current IRB standards because there is evidence that untreated psychosis is itself quite dangerous. Apparently average humans lose a certain amount of brain every year as they get older and this I believe doubles the amount per year so it's kind of a normal process but like rapid aging. Geodon and Thorazine I don't think have been specifically studied but they function so similarly to the other APs I wouldn't expect a difference and they were probably represented in the study I cited in the typical and atypical categories although they weren't studied independently.

So this is one of the reasons pdocs think APs aren't forever anymore. You have to get on a dose and get symptom free for 6 months and during that time get some therapy that will reduce baseline stress and rumination. Try anything you can music medication yoga etc. Do some cognitive remediation to get yourself thinking faster, smarter, etc. Then you start to taper off slowly and when you get symptoms again go back to the previous dose. The goal is as low a dose as possible. You may never get off entirely but the lower it is the safer you are. It's a balance between blocking psychosis which really isn't super functional and may cause damage of it's own vs the meds which cause slow but progressive damage. People getting off the meds at 6 months to 2 years have the best recovery course according to the harrow and wunderink studies. It is the absolutely real world example of being trapped between a rock and a hard place....

Oh right, abilify doesn't really give me any symptoms, I did get really tired - but not anymore.

I was taking it October last year, then the crisis team Dr said it wasn't working, so they changed it, but my Dr just let me start taking it again.

I was just wondering if there's any way to reverse brain tissue loss in general? Not just specifically tissue loss due to APs.

Ok thanks, this is helpful. I definitely need to talk to my docs about this...

The best way is to stop it from happening and you can as far as aging related brain loss. The way to do that is to keep your mind active. Keep educating yourself and challenging your mind. One of the latest studies suggests that having a mentally challenging job helps protect your brain from age related dementia. Less has been studied about the APs but if you can inhibit the age related component you will be ahead of the game anyway.

Thanks for the replies, it helped to alleviate my worry. Either way my pdoc is tapering me off Abilify now. Hopefully the headaches go away.

Lithium is well know to increase gray matter. N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine (NAC) may increase, or at the very least protect existing, white matter.

A longitudinal study of the effects of lithium treatment on prefrontal and subgenual prefrontal gray matter volume in treatment-responsive bipolar disorder patients.

Minocycline synergizes with N-acetylcysteine and improves cognition and memory following traumatic brain injury in rats.

I must be an alien then, because Lithium is exactly what turned me into a retard.

Glad it seems to benefit others.

Abilify to me is a designer med that has special appeal to people looking for a med with no side effects. I think this to be honest , is good marketing on behalf of the organisation that produce it. The truth is it is generally a poorly tolerated med with medium to low efficacy when compared to its counterparts. If you doubt it look to patient and drug forums who allow ratings , there are also many comparative studies on the subject.

This was my experience with Abilify. It didn't really work and gave me unbearable side effects. 2/10

I call it vilify. Made me horribly aggressive. Like wanting to strangle someone. Seriously. Then you hear about shootings and people off their meds or who have me.talk illness and I thought I'll be next in the news.

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