Tardive Dyskinesia can be prevented but it still affects a lot of people around the world. Physicians are there to do everything they can to prevent people from developing diseases. However, instead of curing the original illness, Physicians continue courses of treatment, which can cause patients to develop complications without informing patients of these possible problems during their treatments. It is important that you are aware what TD is and how it is caused if you want to prevent it from affecting you or a loved one.
This disorder is not well known. After all, Tardive Dyskinesia has been kept as hushed up as possible, because it's in the best interests of the big pharmaceutical companies to keep it that way. The fact that some of their best-selling drugs are causing this problem is a fact that they just don't want the general public getting hold of. They include TD as a possible side effect on their information sheets, but only because the government has forced them to do so. Despite the doctors awareness of the negative side effects of medications, they continue to prescribe them to their patients. It's a bad situation that innocent people get caught in the middle of.
A drug which increases the sensitivity of brain towards dopamine causes Tardive Dyskinesia. This affects the part of the brain that controls movement, causing the person to be unable to control certain movements. TD often manifests itself in involuntary distortions of the facial features. An individual having the affliction is likely to make funny facial gestures, stick out his tongue, purse his lips very often, and continueously appear to be gulping or munching something. The patient's limbs can also be affected with involuntary movements like shaking or jerking.
A patient with this disorder may find many different drugs being the cause. The most frequently utilized are antipsychotic medications prescribed for major emotional disorders and other neuroleptic medicines given for digestive conditions.
There are also some non-neuroleptic drugs which can result in Tardive Dyskinesia. These contains generally used drugs in the treatment of depression, such as Prozac, Zoloft, Tofranil, and Elavil.
If you are taking any of these medications, talk with your doctor about it and make sure he's prescribing you the lowest possible dosage and doing it for the shortest time possible. Long-term use of any of these drugs has been found to bring on the onset of TD. It may be with them for the rest of their lives, even if they stop taking the medication that caused it in the first place, once people develop the disorder. Stopping may result in the condition going away, but it could also cause it to get worse.
