I'd say it was almost certainly the sheer amount of the drugs in question. I've never tried CDP, but have found alpha GPC very hard to stack with choline bitartrate or ALCAR without getting bad headaches, even at 100-250mg doses. 2g of either GPC or CDP is a very large dose....I think 2g is like twice as much as the highest dose I've seen in AD studies, and you were taking both at once...
And now 30g of lecithin, which is like ~3g of choline. Why do you take such huge doses of choline precursors, especially after having these kinds of problems?
You're right. And after further experimentation I did find that the CDP choline tended to raise my blood pressure by about 30 points and cause overstimulation at night, causing me to lose sleep. [I wondered if my blood pressure was really going up or if it was just anxiety, so I used a blood pressure cuff and my blood pressure did rise far beyond where it ever is under any circumstance]. Interesting thing to note is that even using smaller doses the effect comes back , though less strong. Previous to that time of my evaluation I did cease all other cholinergic supplements for a few days and was only using citicoline during that time. I'm actually going to be filing a report to the government about the side effect, because though it's on the warning label that it could cause higher or lower blood pressure, I don't hear about it a lot.
Also, I've also tried a round of 16mg galantamine for a few days recently, and it did improve sleep [allowed for much longer sleeping times] and did not cause that same anxiety or change in blood pressure, which would have me assume that perhaps those effects were not caused by a cholinergic mechanism.... but some direct action of the citicoline or its metabolites.
The galantamine has been stopped at this point as well for a couple of days, not sure if I plan on using it again even at low doses.
I am planning to try alpha GPC daily again, but without other cholinergics. I tried it today [I had about a gram of it left over from before], and so far I haven't noticed any strange increases in blood pressure. Hopefully I can be afforded similar benefits on alpha GPC alone that i was getting on CDP choline, minus the side effects.
[PS, i agree it was silly to be taking all those things at once, I planned to use one at a time but became too hasty... so for anyone out there who's taking many things at once without trying a couple of weeks of 'monotherapy' first.. please reconsider!]
currently only taking oxiracetam, sarcosine, agmatine and EPA
Edited by protoject, 14 January 2012 - 03:20 AM.
