Having followed this thread for a long time, I finally decided to give it a go. Unfortunately I was not able to get the brands of Artichoke and Forskolin recommended by abelard lindsay because they were frequently running out of stock at iherb. Apparently a lot of people are following this thread. I used Jarrow Artichoke 500mg and LEF Forskolin 10mg instead.
I started this stack on last Friday. I took 500mg Artichoke and 6mg Forskolin on empty stomach first thing in the morning. Other than dropping the Ashwagandha as I was not sure of possible bad interaction with CILTEP, I kept everything else in my stack. That was a very bad day in terms of cognitive functioning. Very bad attention and focus, writing was not easy, bad typing fluency accompanied by worsened finger pain while typing, slowed processing speed, very sleepy etc etc and etc. Because of being too sleepy, I added 2.2g Madre Labs CaféCeps at around 12pm which helped a lot with alertness. But still, I was stupid that day. It wasn't until in the night when I stared feeling much better which I believe was because of this stack being wearied out.
The next day I dropped Forskolin dosage to 4mg and I was feeling a little bit better but still bad overall. From the third day to fifth day, I took only 3mg Forskolin, still no major improvements, except on the fifth day, I got big improvement, and that was when I added back Ashwagandha. The attention and focus got noticeably better in morning. Processing speed also improved but still suffering. I suspected it to be the problem with acetylcholine as I remembered reading from somewhere that Ashwagandha was an AChE, and I got a lot better since adding Ashwagandha that morning. Therefor I added another 300mg Alpha GPC before lunch which had made a world of difference. Every aspects of my cognitive functioning improved dramatically, from mental energy to processing speed, to writing fluidity, to typing fluency and pain from fingers all got a lot better. And I found out a lot of careless mistakes in my journal. I also noticed much better mood while driving back home in the afternoon. However, I continued to make careless mistakes in the evening, I deleted an important folder on my hard drive and I had never made this kind of mistake in the past.
Today I decrease the Forskolin dosage further to 2mg and was basically the same story as yesterday, not very good (still much better than the first 3 days though) in the beginning but definitely got big improvement after adding in another 300mg Alpha GPC.
Since all my symptoms while on CILTEP stack seemed to be classical sign of acetylcholine deficiency, especially the slowed processing speed which causes the brain to ignore lots of signals, and I responded very well on the cholinergic stuff I added in, I started to suspect Forskolin (or Artichoke) being an anti-cholinergic, I searched on the Internet and came up with a study "Forskolin increases the rate of acetylcholine receptor desensitization at rat soleus endplates".
Abstract We have studied the function of acetylcholine (AcCho) receptors (AcChoRs) in rat soleus endplates before and after exposing the muscles to forskolin, a potent activator of adenylate cyclase. AcChoR function was tested by recording the membrane depolarization evoked by pulses of ionophoretically applied AcCho. Brief (2 msec) AcCho pulses delivered at 7 Hz evoked constant responses at untreated endplates. In contrast, after 10-100 microM forskolin was added to the bath, responses to similar pulse trains fell by as much as 80% within 1 sec. AcCho sensitivity recovered completely in less than 1 min after the pulses were stopped but fell again when the pulses were resumed. Similarly, longer (1 sec) ionophoretic AcCho pulses evoked roughly constant responses at control endplates, but after forskolin treatment the depolarization fell by one-half within less than 200 msec. These results indicate that forskolin increases the rate at which AcChoRs desensitize when exposed to agonist. Focal extracellular recordings showed that 20-100 microM forskolin also increased the decay rate of miniature endplate currents, indicating that forskolin may decrease AcChoR channel open time. Inhibitors of cAMP phosphodiesterase increased the potency of forskolin. When used alone, these inhibitors had effects similar to those of forskolin but smaller. Patch-clamp experiments indicated that forskolin at 100 microM may also interact with AcChoR channels directly, but at 20 microM this effect is negligible. Therefore, it is likely that the forskolin effects were mediated primarily by increased levels of intracellular cAMP.
→ source (external link)
I haven't got time to read carefully the full study yet, but I have started to get a bit nervous as to whether this stack is healthy to the brain long term. I don't think desensitizing acetylcholine receptor is a good thing. I hope somebody could take a close look at this study, especially when the full study is easily available on Google search
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I'm eager to hearing from you guys with regard to my new discovery.
