It is intersting to read someone's description of the symptom changes they experience while on a treatment. I wonder,
@leokitten whether you would describe your current experience while taking Abilfy as similar to, or noticeably different from, your experience during your period of remission while on the keto diet that you described a few years ago?
The biggest difference by far I can remember, and this is a huge difference - is with the ketogenic diet after the first couple weeks, where I felt OMG I'm in remission, if I physically or mentally exerted to the same level I can now do on Abilify I would crash. Keto would make the crashes pretty short and recovery fast for the first few months, but I would still crash from overexertion nonetheless. I would also increasingly get the intense carb hunger signaling that I was overexerting and going to crash very soon even before keto, but keto made that stronger once it started to slowly not work as well. With Abilify (and moclobemide) nope none of that.
I've been on Abilify over 3 months now and haven't crashed once or had any really significant PEM, and I've exerted the same or sometimes more than when I was on keto. It's like Abilify just prevents it from happening or drastically reduces it.
If the reason Abilify is able to do this has nothing to do with the effects it has on cellular metabolism (it has a negative effect on sugar metabolism, but counterintuitively with ME who knows that could be pushing ME metabolic dysfunction to normalize somehow), then this is one step towards proof that, at least for a significant ME subset, PEM and other symptoms are neurological and at the end of some pathway driven by dysregulation of dopamine and serotonin systems in the brain.
Another difference is that Abilify had normalized my sleep! Or maybe the moclobemide with Abilify is the combo making the difference here. But the over two months I was on moclobemide before starting low dose Abilify I didn't have any improvements in sleep.
For the first month or so Abilify made falling asleep more difficult, but once I got through that phase the payback on sleep has been really good. I wake up at a normal early time now and get truly tired, even yawning and watery eyes, at the right time at night. Everything shifted forward back to normal instead of ME falling asleep at 2-4am because of intense wired but tired and other symptoms.
I still need to take my regular sleep meds which I've been cycling and taking for years, but for some reason the Abilify (or together with moclobemide) makes them work much more effectively with a lower dosage, and the important thing is that they never fail to work. And I fall asleep fairly quickly after getting the wave of tiredness at night, similar to before ME.
Before Abilify, multiple times a week (depending on exertion that day or days before) I would not be able to fall asleep or get control of the night symptoms no matter how much I tried to knock myself out in desperation with sleep meds.
The keto diet did help with sleep too, particularly in the beginning along with the other symptom improvements. I felt a significant improvement in the wired but tired symptom at night, but it didn't normalize my sleep time or help nearly as much as Abilify has (and possibly moclobemide).
