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:
“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)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)