Posted by Noa on January 5, 2001, at 8:31:52
In reply to Re: Anyone side-affects Jan + motivation, posted by Kaarina on January 4, 2001, at 17:31:02
>When I just drift off to sleep it seems like a rubberband snaps in my body and I jerk, sometimes its just my legs kick. Is this the same for you?
This is called myoclonus. I have this with Effexor, and had it with Paxil, too. It included twitching/flexing of random individual muscles or muscle groups---muscles that I could never flex at will---or total body jerks. It only happened at complete rest, like when lying down before falling asleep. On Paxil, my forearm would just shoot straight up in the air! BTW, some myoclonus is normal for everyone--you know, the *occasional* sensation just before drifting off to sleep, of falling. For me, it is somewhat dose related--ie, worse at higher doses.
What works for me is that I now take a slightly lower dose of effexor and take serzone to augment it. Serzone apparently blocks action on one of the serotonin receptors, the one that is associated with the restlessness, myoclonus, etc. This helps me by getting rid of the myoclonus almost 100%, and by allowing me to fall asleep and stay asleep all night, whereas before, I had terrible insomnia and restlessness.
As an aside, I would love to see research someday about what factors are associated with what appear (at least to me, lay person that I am) to be two main types of reaction to effexor and ssris---people who get sleepy from them, and people who get the insomnia, restlessness, and myoclonus, etc. I suspect there is some significant difference but I would love to know if it is directly related to the chemistry of the depression or other mental disorder, or related through some other aspect of a person's chemical makeup (either brain chemistry or something like endocrine disorders, etc), or some totally spurious factor. I like to think that this kind of research could yield guidelines that could help refine diagnosis and treatment decisions.
poster:Noa
thread:13781
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20001231/msgs/50950.html