Vivid dreams

[Marina's mum]

My daughter, Marina, has recently started having really vivid dreams, usually followed by partial seizures in the morning. She is taking Tegetol, Clonazapam and Keppra. She has been taking Omega 3 fish oil capsules, various B vitamins and calcium for about a month now to see if this reduces the seizures.

We're trying to reduce her anti-epileptic drugs as the side-effects are turning her into a zombie. She's tired all the time, can't concentrate or think straight, and is becoming depressed. We have managed to reduce her Keppra to 750mgs a day, instead of 1500 with little change in the frequency of her seizures, although these vivid dreams have started to happen.

Can somebody out there please let us know if our present regime can cause vivid dreams, and does anybody have any opinions about what we are doing?

Thanks - Dee

[Bernard]

My wife had super vivid dreams when she was taking 5-HTP.

I personally tend to have really vivid dreams if I eat spicy peppers/food at dinner.

If you are doing things by trial and error, I'd recommend you keep a diary/journal/record of what you are doing and how it affects her. Sometimes, you can only notice patterns over time when you can see it laid out on paper.

Has she ever had her calcium/potassium/magnesium levels checked? Taking too much calcium can interfere with some anti-epileptic drugs IIRC.

[IslandLiz]

Bernard et al. -- Can you provide citations to more about calcium and anti-epileptic drugs? I've just done a search through some of the standard scholarly medical journal literature and found a number of citations to very complex chemistry articles about calcium, including one with the title Calcium and Autosomal Dominant Nocturnal Frontal Lobe Epilepsy (Rodrigues-Pinguet et al., J Physiol 2003, 550(Pt1):11-26 and others like that.

I'm not a chemist, but it seems as if calcium is interacting with glutamate release. This interests me because I'm taking a glutamate antagonist for an experimental anti-epileptic drug (via Mayo Clinic) and am wondering whether I should continue with my daily calcium intake.

Can you help interpret if I provide the citations or literature?

[epileric]

IMHO you should contact the clinic & ask them. They'd be most familiar with the effects of the anti-epileptic drug's they're experimenting with

[Nakamova]

In the brain, excess glutamate around a nerve cell can allow calcium to enter the cell and kill it. But this is a complex process, not the direct result of taking a supplement. I agree with Eric -- the clinic should be able to provide with some answers.

[Bernard]

... I'm taking a glutamate antagonist for an experimental anti-epileptic drug ...

If you are in a clinical trial, they should be answering questions like that for you. It's in their interest to ensure that the study results are not skewed.