Some observations on different meds and eye muscles and vision

degen

Since I got new prismatic glasses prescription which helped me so much a couple of years back, I have continually noted that certain medications have effects on my eyes and vision. Especially notable are the negative changes caused by drugs which have muscle relaxant effects:

Anticholinergics, including in particular some tricyclics such as amitriptyline and cyclobenzaprine. Doxepin is okay in low doses
GABA B agonists: Baclofen, Phenibut, F-Phenibut
Cannabidiol (CBD) - Surprisingly a potent muscle relaxant in high dose and high bioavailability formulations, an effects not as pronounced in THC-predominant products
Alcohol

Even though some of these drugs can appear to improve symptoms at first, they are eventually harmful. Some are almost immediately harmful to me, like alcohol. They can cause or worsen double vision.

I guess muscle relaxants impair convergence. Dr. Debby also mentioned this to me multiple times. IIRC she said they over-relax the eye muscles and are especially harmful in people with BVD (binocular vision dysfunction). She was concerned about a (relatively low) dose of a benzodiazepine I was taking for that reason.

Personally, I found low-dose benzodiazepines were one of the only drug classes which had quite positive effect on my eyes, and which I had to (almost) finish tappering off of for different reasons. Still, I can't discount the fact that they were subtly affecting my eyes over time.

Opioids shrink my pupils as expected as miotic drugs and improve photosensitivity. However it is still possible to develop headaches from bad screens over time and not notice its build-up, perhaps due being under an analgesic effect, so the improvement seems modest at best.

SSRIs dilate my pupils, a well known effect. Strangely, in a low-to-moderate dose they seem to improve my tolerance to bad screens and to flickering in particular. The effect is small but can be enough to increase the tolerability of some screens. SSRIs have complex effects on vision besides just pupil dilation. This is due to the effects of extra serotonin in the nerves and brain and is not well understood (at least not by me). Concerningly, there appears to be the potential for long-term changes in vision which might not be easily reversal by withdrawal of the drug.

This has been discussed many times in the forum here, but since there are always a different group of active users, I want to ask what you have noticed about drugs and medications and their effects on our 'problem.'

async

degen Interesting take. Didn't think about it like muscle relaxants. Antihistamines that are anticholinergic are hell tbh. I even ended up with large rainbow rings around light sources after some strong antihistamines with alcohol. Supposedly connected to glaucoma and eye pressure.

For whoever going down this route, remember that magnesium is a muscle relaxant (even tho it has tons and tons of other beneficial effects), and excessive calcium can causes muscle weakness. On the other hand too low calcium can cause hyperexcitability, so don't overdo it in any direction.

Other electrolyte imbalances can also affect muscles pretty significantly, so chances are that if anything feels like it is cramping in your body something is off. And remember that excessive tap water depletes electrolytes, and waters down pretty much everything in your bloodstream until the feedback loops brings it back up again. I swear that there are at least a few people in this forum that would get rid of their symptoms if they forgot the programming that mindless water consumption is always beneficial.

Sunspark

Both of you should do a DNA test to see what various things are like involving neurotransmitters, detoxification cycles, etc.

async

Sunspark Got full genome sequencing. Spent a ton of time with it, but the amount of mutations is just too much to draw anything meaningful from unless things are narrowed down to something plausible.

madmozg

From my perspective I didn't notice that some drugs could give me any kind of worsening of my vision or to increase sensitivity to bad screens with pwm/frc. The only bad thing I notice is lack of sleep, depression and anxiety which comes one from another or vise versa, this will increase my sensitivity a bit more.

Sunspark

async Ok, so start with a methylation panel layout. COMT is one of the important ones on it. Is it slow, fast or intermediate? This is an example of what I mean https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/click-here-for-happiness/202001/what-is-the-comt-gene-and-how-does-it-affect-your-health

Mine is slow. I've known this for awhile, but recently I've decided to start focusing on it.

int

I think you are on to something here, Anticholinergics are bad for me too.

async

Sunspark I need to dive into it again. There's so many rabbit holes when you start looking into mutations and pathways that might not be working at 100%. Many things are not really classified as a disease unless you have a homogenous mutation, but a heterogenous will in some cases just give 50% of an enzyme, and obviously don't start seizuring up as a newborn, but nevertheless get issues whenever more extreme events happen a person without the mutation would handle just fine. For example you could have a case where you do just find with honey and galactose, but if you figure out you should revolve your entire diet around it you'll end up with ammonia and hyperexcitability. There's thousands of these mutations.

Is been on my list for a while to write a better tool to link these mutations with potential diet and supplement adjustments.

I have some COMT mutations, but I'll have to upload the full genome to check all is them. Really need to read up properly on methylation. Just covered it briefly. There's an insane amount of things people have no idea exist in relation to inborne errors of metabolism and channelopathies that are highly relevant. Unfortunately it is rather hard to draw conclusions from gene data for issues that doesn't absolutely wreck you.

Urine organic acids panels like Metabolomix are also really interesting for figuring out potential issues.