Pharmacometrics in psychiatry

Published on January 19, 2015   35 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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0:00
This presentation deals with pharmacometrics in psychiatry. My name is Lesbeth de Lange, and I work at the Leiden Academic Center of Drug Research at the Systems Pharmacology Cluster the Division of Pharmacology at Leiden University.
0:15
The outline of this presentation is as follows. First I will talk about psychiatric disorders, a little about genetics, then psychoactive drugs, diagnosis and treatment, pharmacometric approaches, and then some discussion, and then some recommendations to a better treatment.
0:34
The term "psychiatric disease" is used when mental illness significantly interferes with the performance of major life activities such as learning, working, and communicating. Psychiatric disorders may come and go, and do not always follow a regular pattern. Moreover, the type, intensity, and duration of the symptoms vary from person to person, so this makes it very difficult to predict when psychiatric symptoms will bristle and proper functioning will decline. Medication and psychotherapy are often helpful in control of symptoms. In some of the patients, the mental illness may even go into remission while in others the illness pursues. The most common forms of psychiatric disorders are anxiety, major depressive disorder, and psychosis.
1:22
So about anxiety, this is characterized by non or specific worries of fears, avoidance behavior, increased attentional capture by potential signs of danger, and interpretation of expressions, comments and events in a negative manner.
1:40
Then major depressive disorders are characterized by episodes of all-encompassing low mood, accompanied by a low self-esteem. Then there was a loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities.