2 replies to this topic

[jack black]

This is the 2nd time i tried memantine for my ADD symptoms. this time i attempted to escalate to the therapeutic dose of 20mg/day. in the 3rd week, when i started taking 15mg/day, i noticed being way more irritable/wired/spacey in addition to slightly better memory and slight motivation increase. this reminded me the effects of high dose fish oil where i felt like that after a couple of weeks and could not take it anymore. with fish oil i attributed that to increased choline and hence Ach production. but i remembered that memantine blocks some ACh receptors (nicotinic ones to be specific).

 

i googled and found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm...pubmed/21704049

 

looks like memantine is known to be pro-ACh drug, makes sense that they give it to people with Alzheimer disease.

 

is there anyone else who has that weird reaction to anything pro-ACh?

 

 

[whiteelephant]

When I took it previously, about 9 years ago, I felt like I was anxious, but more strategic.  I could dominate a super smart friend in a strategy game and became interested in chess.  Not sure if my overall abstract thinking/conceptualization improved.

 

Currently, I'm on 28 mg memantine.  dose increase  7 mg every 10 days.  It's hard to say whether it's working.  I honestly don't know if anything works anymore.  I get less worked up about things, but in some ways, I feel like I'm making the same amount of mistakes.  I am pretty forgetful.  I wish I were better able to discern positive effects and learn from my 10 years of medication/nootropic/lifestyle experiments.  The only lesson is that nothing works.

[Keizo]

I generally don't tolerate racetams, CDP-choline, nicotine and caffeine. And there is vaguely speaking the same problem with all of these substances, I tend to get a stiff neck, headaches, loose focus, but usually tolerate the substance for an hour or a few days then the tension builds and the lack of focus and whatever else increases. 

 

Even something I tolerate quite well like fasoracetam (which I find super effective for studying) after several weeks at high enough dosages (not more than 100mg/day) I eventually got really stressed out and my neck got really stiff and I completely failed one of my final exams, but the stiffness and fog was rather present for several days around this peak. 

 

One thing I can note is that I used to tolerate nicotine quite well, but I imagine my cerebrolysin use or maybe using and quitting benzodiazepines made me really sensitive to nicotine. Nicotine these days tends to make me really tense after a day or two after starting, but it's a bit hard to tell maybe a lot of it is simply not being tolerant to overall effects any longer (due to not using enough nicotine products) as my nicotine use has been rather sporadic in recent times. So I might to a large extent simply be stuck in the initial phase of cigarette/snus usage where the effects always are unpleasant --- only problem with this explanation is it doesn't explain why I can tolerate cigarettes or snus for the first few days rather well and it gets worse rather than better from starting to several days or weeks in.

 

For reference, things this doesn't happen with: methylphenidate 30mg/day (or even higher in the past). I can eat this however long time I want and there are basically no side effects, only annoying thing with taking it for a long period day after day is I don't get the psychological boost and start wondering if anything is happening.

 

Edited by Keizo, 07 July 2019 - 07:43 AM.