Treatment
If an overdose by ingestion is suspected, the patient should be given gastric lavage, activated charcoal, or both; this could make the difference between life and death in a close situation, but it should be avoided unless there is evidence of overdose as it can aggravate the patient.
The first line treatments are diazepam and a non-selective beta blocker; other antihypertensive drugs may also be used. Not all benzodiazepines and beta blockers are safe to use in an adrenergic storm; for instance, alprazolam and propranolol; alprazolam weakly agonizes dopamine receptors and causes catecholamine release while propranolol mildly promotes some catecholamine release.
After bringing the heart rate and blood pressure down, treatment is supportive; if there is an underlying condition causing the adrenergic storm, then that must be addressed. However, many cases of adrenergic storms are completely idiopathic in nature; indeed, they are a poorly understood phenomena.
Read more about this topic: Adrenergic Storm
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)