depression some of the md s in this newsgroup have been riding my butt pretty good maybe in some cases with good reason in this post on depression i m laying it all out i ll continue to post here because i think that i have some knowledge that could be useful once you have read this post you should know where i m coming from when i post again in the future in article netnews upenn edu lchaplyn mail sas upenn edu lida chaplynsky writes a family member of mine is suffering from a severe depression brought on by menopause as well as a mental break down she is being treated with halydol with some success but the treatments being provided through her psychiatrist are not satisfactory someone suggested contacting a nutritionist to discuss alternative treatment since she is sensitive to medication i think this is a good suggestion but don t know where to begin if anyone can suggest a philly area nutritionist or else some literature to read i d appreciate it lida i can emphasize with your situation both my wife and i suffered from bouts of depression her s was brought on by breast cancer and mine was a rebound stress reaction to her modified radical mastectomy and chemotherapy lida i used my knowledge of nutrition to get her through her six months of chemotherapy with the approval of her oncologist when severe depression set in a few months after the chemo stopped i tried to use supplements to bring her out of it i had cured her pms using supplements and i really thought that i knew enough about the role of diet in depression to take care of her depression as well it didn t work and she was put on prozac by her oncologist two winters ago three years after by wife s breast cancer i got hit with severe depression pretty typical and one reason why many marriages break up after breast cancer or another stressor i tried to take care of it for several months with supplementation didn t work my internist ended up putting me on prozac i was going to give you a list of several studies that have been done using b niacin folate and b to cure depression i m not going to do that because all you would be doing is flying blind like i was lida i do believe that depression can have a dietary component but the problem is that you need to know exactly what the problem is and then use an approach which will fix the problem for chemotherapy i knew exactly what drugs were going to be used and exactly what nutrients would be affected same thing for pms i was flying blind for both of these stressors but the literature that i used to devise a treatment program was pretty good depression is just too complicated what you really need is a nutritional scan this is not a diet analysis but an analysis of your bodies nutrient reserves for every vitamin and mineral except vitamin c you have a reserve the rda is not designed to give you enough of any nutrient to keep these reserves full it is only designed to keep them from being emptied which would cause clinical pathology stress will increase your need for many vitamins and minerals this is when your reserves become very important lida without your permission i m going to use your post as a conduit to try to explain to the readers in this group and sci med where i m coming from i have taught a course on human nutrition in one of the osteopathic medical schools for ten years now i ve written my own textbook because none was available what i teach is not a rehash of biochemistry i preach nutrient reserves yes my lectures in this course are referred to by my students as sermons here is what i cover indroduction and carbohydrates lipids proteins i proteins ii energy balance evaluation of nutritional status i a clinical perspective evaluation of nutritional status ii evaluation of nutritional a biochemical perspective status iii homework assignment using the nutritionist iv diet and fitness analysis software program weight control food fads and facts age related change in nutrient requirements food additives contaminants and cancer drug nutrient interactions mineral and water balance sodium potassium and chloride calcium magnesium and phosphorus iron zinc and copper iodine and fluoride other trace minerals vitamin a vitamin e vitamins d and k vitamin c thiamin and niacin riboflavin and pyridoxine pantothenic and folic acids biotin and b other nutrient factors enteral nutrition parenteral nutrition every three years i spend my entire summer reviewing the medical literature to find material that i can use in my nutrition textbook i last did this in the summer of i read everything that i can find and then sit down and rewrite my lecture handouts which are bound in three separate books that have and pages opposite each page of written text which i write myself i ve pulled figures tables and graphs from various copyrighted sources since this material is only being used for educational purposes i can get around the copyright laws so far i can not send this material out to newsgroup readers as i ve been asked to do i am now in the process of trying to get a grant to setup a nutrition assessment lab this is the last peice of the nutrition puzzle that i need to make my education program complete this lab will let me measure the nutrient reserve for almost all the vitamins and minerals that are known to be required in humans the mayo clinic already uses a similiar lab to design supplement programs for their cancer patients cancer treatment centers of america which is a private for profit organization with hospitals in illinois and oklahoma tulsa also operates a nutritional assessment clinical lab i also believe that the pritikin clinic in california has a similiar lab setup for physicians reading this post i would suggest that you get the new clinical nutrition textbook that has just been published feb by mosby i have been using alpers manual of nutritional therapeutics a little brown series book as a supplemental text for my course but alpers is geared more to residency training two m d s have written this new clinical nutrition textbook and it is geared more towards medical student education and it does a good job of covering the lab tests that can be run to assess a patient s nutritional status let me quote a few sentences from the preface of this new text so called nutrition specialists were in reality gastroenterologists hematologists or pediatricians who just happened to profess some knowledge of nutrition as it related to their field of practice unfortunately about two thirds of the medical schools in the united states require no formal instruction in nutrition but times and medical practice have changed more than half of the leading causes of death in this country are nutrition related this monograph should accomplish the following two objectives it should complement your medical training by emphasizing the relevance of nutrition to your medical practice and it should heighten your awareness of nutrition as a medical speciality that is vitally important for both disease prevention and the treatment of diseases of essentially every organ system roland l weinsier md drph lida my advise to you is that you tell your family members to try to find a physician who has an understanding of the role that vitamins and minerals yes even magnesium may play a role in depression play in depression and who could get a nutritional profile run menopause is often a time when women suffer depression there are a lot of hormonal changes that are occuring but they are not the same ones that occur during pms a nutritionist may also be able to help not too long ago a poster mentioned that his nutritionist had diagnosed a selenium deficiency based on a red cell glutathionine peroxidase test the specific test for the selenium reserve most clinical labs will not run this test and i advised him to try to make sure that the lab that did the test was certified there are also a lot of hair and nail analysis labs setup to do trace mineral analysis but these labs are not regulated checks of these labs using certified standards and also those doing water lead analysis showed some pretty shoddy testing was going on if you or anyone else finds someone who will run these speciality nutrition tests make sure that they are using a lab that has been certified under clia the clinical laboratory improvement act a diet analysis may be helpful since many nutrient reserves have been shown to correlate fairly well with the dietary intake as monitored by food logging and software analysis nutritionist iv and other software programs but there are still about half of the nutrients required by humans that do not show a very good correlation between apparent dietary intake and reserve status until we have more nutritional assessment clinical labs in operation in the u s and physicians who have been trained how to use the nutritional profile that these labs provide to devise a treatment approach that uses diet changes and supplementation anti depressants will probably continue to be the best approach to depression martin banschbach ph d professor of biochemistry and chairman department of biochemistry and microbiology osu college of osteopathic medicine without discourse there is no remembering without remembering there is no learning without learning there is only ignorance
