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:
“Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“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)
“Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)