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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> It's usually treated with medications like Zoloft and Paxil that boost and stabilize the neurotransmitter serotonin, leading to reduced anxiety and enhanced emotional well-being

How do figure the boost and stabilize part for a patient? Do they take samples of neurotransmitters in the spinal fluid before and after and looking for neurotransmitter concentrations?

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There's a divide in the marketing language vs the research language on this topic. Marketing says some handwavy statement like "Zoloft stabilizes serotonin levels", but the research on the topic basically says that we assume that's how it works based on what we know about the brain & the drug, but we don't actually have proof of the mechanism.

I always think for some reason that by now with all advancements in technology they'd eventually get to a point where they start measuring these things so going to doctor like that people might hear "your level were out of balance, here are the numbers" and then they get treatment and now, look, another lab result shows we fixed your levels. But it doesn't seems we are quite there yet.

You can't exactly pull some brain matter out to send to the lab, which makes research very difficult.

Of course not in humans. Though can probably be done experimental with animals. With all the side effects and trade-offs involved with these drugs surely they had to be doing something like it?

I was mostly thinking maybe sample the blood or spinal fluid, or use imaging tracing markers to see how the imbalance manifests and then it can be corrected.

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