Unit 2 Flashcards
39% of all student participants, or about 17,960 students, screened positive for anxiety disorder. For both undergrads and graduate students, those who major in the arts, humanities, communication and design reported more mental health challenges than those in other fields of study. Why should you not treat them with benzos long term?
addiction potential
What are some problems with electroconvulsive therapy?
high cost, stigmatization, and short-term memory loss
What contributes to the urge to drink more than usual during stressful times?
CRF intensifies alcohol craving and reward
Benzodiazepines (e.g., alprazolam (Xanax)) potentiate the actions of
glutamate agonists
A 45-year-old man with a history of active alcoholism and chronic hepatitis C presented to the emergency department for haematemesis (bloody vomit) and haematochezia (bloody diarrhea) beginning 5 days before. The patient was alert but sweating with a high heart rate (140 beats/min) and low arterial blood pressure (87/36 mm Hg; normal is 120/80).
Which of the following alcohol-related disease processes is the most likely cause of these symptoms?
ruptured esophageal varicose vein
When he was brought to the emergency department, he was not oriented to time, place, and person, very restless, agitated, talking irrelevantly, had palpitations (erratic heart beat), sweating, tremors, and he insisted he was hearing voices that threatened him. He was diagnosed to have alcohol withdrawal syndrome – his daily consumption of alcoholic beverages (average 8 drinks per day) had ceased 72 hours before.
Which of the following is a significant risk for him if he is not treated immediately?
seizure
At the Fanboy Expo, an argument breaks out about alcohol’s effects on driving. While everybody has opinions, only you have the facts, and you inform them that alcohol-induced driving impairment is
detectable at blood levels as low as 0.035 g/dL
The differential role of stimulation and sedation as measurable and distinct alcohol effects has formed the basis of many of the most prominent theories of risk for alcohol dependence. There is evidence that persons at risk for alcohol use disorders experience heightened positive-like effects of alcohol during the rising limb of the blood alcohol curve (BAC), and reduced sedative-like effects during the declining limb compared to their low-risk counterparts.
This theory highlights the importance of the “shape” of an individual’s
biphasic alcohol response
Compound X, a major toxic metabolite, is one of the principal culprits mediating fibrogenic and mutagenic effects of alcohol in the liver. Mechanistically, compound X promotes adduct formation, leading to functional impairments of key proteins, including enzymes, as well as DNA damage, which promotes mutagenesis.
Compound X is clearly a bad actor! It is
acetaldehyde
Your least favorite person sits down next to you at breakfast and begins to pontificate about anxiety and how to manage it. She says a number of outrageous things that I can’t repeat here, but she does correctly say that
genetic factors confer significant risk for developing an anxiety disorder
For a number of drug classes, there are examples of incomplete or partial cross tolerance between two members of the class. This means that development of tolerance to a first drug results in a measurable, but lesser degree of tolerance to the second drug. Which of the following would be a potential explanation for incomplete or partial cross tolerance between two drugs?
binding to different subsets of the subtypes of a receptor
One local mother has learned first-hand the potential repercussions associated with prenatal alcohol drinking after adopting a child with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). Julie Pollock’s son, whose birth mother drank alcohol during pregnancy, was found mentally incompetent to stand trial after he was accused of killing his friend when he was just 10 years old.
Which of the following was the most disastrous aspect of the birth mother’s alcohol consumption?
drinking during the first trimester
A 18-year old college freshman and his roommate decide to get rich by concocting a new, addictive drug in a makeshift lab in a closet in their bedroom. Satisfied with the look and smell of the pungent goo they’ve made, they each take a slurp. Minutes later both are shaking with fear and intense anxiety, and they realize their new drug has at least some action as a
GABA inverse agonist
I was an underweight suicidal mess and when I tried to quit I hallucinated earthquakes I was shaking so much at times. When I came back into recovery, cross dependence had kicked my butt. That’s been my experience. If it’s a downer, putting it into my body is bad.
Why did quitting “downers” cause her to “hallucinate earthquakes” and shake severely?
glutamate receptor upregulation
Our current diagnostic criteria have evolved in a haphazard and politically driven manner from a century and a half of effort to get the classification of psychiatric illness right. In addition, the disappointing outcome of this entire endeavor is that, today, the field’s nosology seems even farther from “cutting nature at the joints,”—discerning the true illness entities locked in the brain—than it did in 1900.
Which of the following explains, in part, the difficulties of discerning the true illness entities locked in the brain?
the brain is by far the most complex organ in the body
“I can’t even remember what happened that night” is a common joke/cry for help among people who recently drank to the point of blacking out. But there’s also evidence that drinking even a little bit can seriously impair learning and memory.
Sleep, especially the REM phase when dreams occur, is when memories get cemented into our minds. Alcohol blocks REM sleep, and as a result, says University of California, Berkeley, professor Matthew Walker, drinking can make you forget new information—even if the drinking happens days after the learning took place.
These actions on memory formation result in part from alcohol’s actions as a
glutamate antagonist
X deficiency causes “alcohol flush syndrome,” presenting as alcohol-induced facial flushing, tachycardia (rapid heart rate), nausea, and headaches. One of the most common hereditary enzyme deficiencies, it affects 35%–40% of East Asians and 8% of the world population. X deficiency is associated with lower risk of development of alcohol use disorder, but increased risk for upper digestive tract cancers.
What is X?
aldehyde dehydrogenase
