GABA has changed my life :)

Post Reply New Topic

I take Neurontin/Gabapentin which has an effect on GABA. I take it for my OCD & it helps alot with the obsessive thoughts & the compulsions. It doesn't help with the anxiety aspect thou but I take Buspar which helps my anxiety alot.

Yes, Buspar is interesting. I haven't used it though there are a number of reports like yours, and it is said to raise GABA levels too, though I haven't checked out the research on it myself to date.

I've done a little research on Buspar before I started taking it & I don't remember reading that it has an effect on GABA but I could of missed it or just forgot. I liked how it was specially for anxiety instead of being an antidepressant or a benzo. It does help my Generalized Anxiety & stopped me from having panic attacks but it didn't help my obsessions or compulsions. After trying Buspar for alittle while, I've done research on OCD treatments & decided to try Neurontin. The combination of Busapr & Neurontin works well for me; they help me with different things so I kind of need both.

I forgot to mention that my girlfriend takes a supplement called NAC(N-Acetyl Cysteine) which is antioxidant that can have an effect on GABA. She wasn't ready to try meds but was willing to try a supplement. It helps her OCD but I don't think it helps with her general anxiety too much. She also takes Busapr which helps her anxiety some. She takes 1gram of NAC 2x a day. I thought about trying NAC alittle but the Neurontin has been working for me & it's a lot cheaper to get a prescription of that cuz I'm in the Medicare extra help program.

As said, nothing much goes into your brain to promote gaba in your brain.
although supplement reviews says it mays them go to sleep easier
if its calms you down and makes you sleep easier, Kava tea, chamomile does the same trick too

I've read some precursor to produce GABA in your brain includes green tea Theamine , glutamine

Made me feel really social and great for the first 3 days or so taking 500mg 2 times a day and then by day 4 or 5 it didn't go jack s**t anymore. I guess I developed a tolerance for it...

The effect you get may indeed be the effect of GABA, but when you take other things as well you cannot be sure of the cause-and-effect.

Amino acids have great potential but given that these are the building blocks of protein, that the body can source itself when needed, means that more of a good thing does not ultimately guarantee more of a good effect - as the body will adjust to it and find a way to balance the new high levels of GABA. The body and the mind are great at balancing themselves, always to the default state.

So I expect that a lot of you guys will experience rather short lived effects - but I am looking forward to read more on your experiences as it is very interesting

Can anyone recommend me an effective GABA supplement?

Since it's just a basic chemical, it shouldn't make a difference what brand you choose -- they will all be the same. 500 and 750 mg seem to be the most common sizes. I've been trying it for a couple of weeks and it seems to have definitely helped with anxiety. Some people have said to take it on an empty stomach, but that didn't seem to agree with me so I've been taking 750 mg with meals.

B19! I want to post because I want to follow this thread so I can come back and read the links and things more thoroughly. Are you still taking GABA?

I tried it recently, and the results were truly amazing, but I stopped taking it because I have pervasive depressive disorder, and I kept reading things online about how some people who take GABA for more than 2 weeks can have a major depressive episode, or build up a tolerance to it.

If you're still taking it, did you not build up a tolerance? I don't mean to be nosey. I just wondered.

I switched to co-enzyme Q10 to try to heal my digestive tract so that my body could make it's own GABA, but it's not working as dramatically as the GABA. And to be 100% honest, I'm struggling with a major depressive episode right now, anyway. I keep thinking back on the feeling of peace and well being the GABA gave me when I took it, and wondering if that's the way regular people feel all of the time.

Then I found this thread!

I have read an article that says that GABA doesn't have to cross the blood brain barrier in order to get into the brain. I will try to see if I can find the link. I've also thought . . . why does it have to cross into the brain at all? It's a short chain fatty acid, and that is easy food for the mitochondria in your cells in your body. If you have a digestive disorder - and I've read that lots of people with autism do - and your mitochondria are not getting fed because of that, just feeding them GABA should make you feel better without crossing any blood brain barrier, shouldn't it?

I have lots of links about short chain fatty acids, and mitochondria, if anyone wants to look at them, too.

I'm so excited about this thread! I will be back tomorrow to read through it all better, but right now I'm signing off of the computer.

I was going to try everything I could to fix my digestion before trying GABA long term, but now I want to read the links here about people with autism being deficient in GABA. Thank you so much for the links. This means a lot to me!

There is some quite recent research on one particular probiotic as an exceptional GABA booster and I will try and find that for you.

As to pathways - there seems to be a ventral pathway for GABA transportation into the brain, cited by various researchers, and if you have a leaky gut, which seems to be the case for at least a section of people on the spectrum, then it is said that GABA has better and more immediate access to the brain. Whatever. The important thing is that somehow, for some of us it gets into our neural pathways and tops up the available GABA to a 'normal' level, and the effect can be almost immediate and remarkable, as you have also experienced.

As you did, when this first happened to me, I wondered if that was how 'normal' people felt all of the time,and I realised that they were far more different from my innate genetic self than I had thought or known previously. I spent months on end researching GABA after that, amazed that all that life-changing information had bypassed me for so many decades, despite the fact that I was reasonably well educated and had read very widely on anxiety causes and remedies.

I still take GABA occasionally via low dose Clonazepam if I am hyperstressed though my natural levels seem to have increased in the last couple of years (possibly due to giving up GABA antagonists such as coffee). I am going to try the particular probiotic that has been researched though have not done so as yet.

Thank you very much for your feedback. It is refreshing to hear from someone whose experience relates so well to my own, (though not the depression). I know that the effect lessened over time when I took GABA every day, so you have to have space it out after a while to maintain the effect.

Hi, JakeASD.

If you go back to the original post in this thread, there is one link given for a site about GABA. If you look on that site, there is a page with information about good brands of GABA to try. There actually is a difference between natural GABA, and chemically produced GABA (according to the site) in terms of side effects. The GABA I tried is on the list of good brands on this site, and it is from a company called, "Solgar".

Thanks for your reply, B19.

I'm still reading all of the links in this thread. Thanks for the links regarding copper, too. I have been starting to read a little bit about that, lately. There isn't enough time in the day!

I noticed that you said that you have low blood pressure, earlier in the thread. I do, also, and I thought I would share a link I read recently about a study regarding mitochondrial preference for butyric acid when blood flow is restricted to the heart. If you read the whole thing, you'll see that the researchers made sure that oxygen levels were not any different, only blood flow. (Fair warning, the study was conducted on pigs, so if you don't like animal research, you may not want to read it. However, I thought it was excellent, and fairly easy to understand.) Here is the link:

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/105/3/367.full

The main reason that I wanted to try GABA, actually, is because I have muscle spasticity and pain that has been chronic. I've told so many doctors about it, and they show little interest. I have taken burdock root (arctium lappa) since 2011 to help with some of my pain, but didn't know why it worked. I recently joined a forum where I met other people with pain similar to mine, and one of the members tried the burdock, and it worked for her. She asked me why. We are working on two theories. One is that burdock is a diuretic, and might effect the cerebrospinal fluid pressure somehow.

But I'm more partial to the second theory, which is that burdock is a prebiotic. A prebiotic is a food that makes it all the way through the digestive tract pretty much undigested, and when it reaches the colon, the good bacteria there can digest it, and through a fermentation process, change it into a short chain fatty acid, which feeds the mitochondria in your cells. Not every cell in the body has mitochondria, but muscle cells do, and if they are starving for fatty acids, they can't produce the energy they need to function properly.

On that same forum, I read about the medication, baclofen, which can relax spastic muscles, and when I looked it up, I learned that it is not habit forming, and people don't build up a tolerance to it. I also read that it worked with GABA receptors, and so that led me to reading about GABA, and learning that it is also a short chain fatty acid. I tried it, and the result was the muscle relaxation that I had wished for my entire life. The sense of well being was only a pleasant surprise, to me.

Here are some other links about mitochondria and fatty acids (these are just abstracts, and are very short):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23703093
http://pen.sagepub.com/content/38/5/587.abstract

Here is a link about mitochondrial disease:

http://www.umdf.org/site/c.8qKOJ0MvF7LU ... isease.htm

And here are links that I've just come across today, and haven't had time to read yet, but I found them based upon things that you have said earlier in this thread. They mostly look pretty good, and I'd like to share them!:

https://healingautismandadhd.wordpress. ... ents/gaba/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4477717/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4085902/
http://autismcoach.com/neurotransmitters-and-autism/
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content ... 3.full.pdf

I have also learned that GABA can help people with conditions as varied as tinnitus, stroke, and diabetic neuropathic pain. It's my belief that everyone's body chemistry is different, though. And I also want to stress that anyone wanting to try an herb or supplement should read about it carefully, and consider things like whether you may be allergic, or have another condition, or be taking a medication that would interact badly with it. Burdock root, for example, can lower blood sugar, so people already taking medication to regulate blood sugar should not take burdock root!!

I am going to look up GABA agonists, as well. Thank you for mentioning that. I do drink a lot of coffee. For now, as I said before, I am trying out co enzyme Q10, and that seems to be having a mild positive effect. I've bought a bottle of a combination of enzymes to try when I run out of the Q10. I'm hoping that it will work better than just taking one enzyme at a time. But I can see that there is a lot more to learn. I've noticed in my reading that a lot of holistic practitioners recommend not just digestive enzymes, but also adding micro-nutrients, and essential fatty acids. So, in the long run, I may do that. But I don't care to take more things than I have to.

I really appreciate your posts telling me that many people with autism are deficient in GABA. I've been feeling unwell for so long, and I'm very glad to learn anything I can. I feel like I'm finally on the right track with the autism/digestive disorders lead. I wish I had known about all of this thirty years ago!

Take care, everyone.

I forgot to include the link that discussed GABA and the blood brain barrier. Here it is:

http://www.naturalstresscare.org/gaba.aspx#.VxvyyfkrKUk

And another about healing the gut, I haven't read yet, but it looks very thorough:

http://fixyourgut.com/improve-your-mito ... ochondria/

^^^^fascinating info, enough for weeks of study

I lost a lot of computer files late last year unfortunately, due to malware, and can't easily re-find the research links to the probiotic I mentioned (which is L Rhamnosus). Probably I will come across them again in the future somewhere.

Meantime, this is a quick potted summary: Lactobacillus rhamnosus

This interesting bacteria is found in dirt, kefir, and the human gut, and has been demonstrated to reduce anxiety via the neurotransmitter GABA. (It increases the levels of available Gaba circulating in the brain)

Mechanism: Gut bacteria influence the brain via the vagus nerve, which connects the gut and brain with a hundred million nerve cells.

As well as taking l. rhamnosus in probiotic supplement form it can be ingested via store-bought kefir. There are a number of anecdotal user reports online also noting rapid and startling effect.

auntblabby . . . I think I hoard information, ha ha. I joke with my son that some day someone will look something up on the internet, and their browser will reply, 'sorry! plainjain is saving that information! you'll have to try again later.' Learning about heatlh and herbs, however, has been a mainstay for me for a long time. I'd like to feel better!

B19, it's no trouble that you can't find the exact link! It's good enough that you gave me the name of the probiotic, and told me where I can find it. If I can't afford kefir, I think I can find some dirt, pretty easy.

I don't know why this is popping into my brain and I'm going to share it. It's really basically irrelevant information.

I was watching a National Geographic tv show the other day called, 'Survive the Tribe', I think. Kind of a weird name. Maybe it should be called, 'Surviving like a Tribe member', or something. But that's not the story.

There is this survival instructor who learns about survival techniques from tribes members, and then wanders around in their part of the world teaching those techniques. In this particular episode, he was in Papua New Guinea, I think. He comes along to this downed, rotting Sago Palm tree, and explains that the people who live there had cut the tree down a while back in order to make a flour out of the core of the tree. I have heard of Sago palm flour before, but because I had been reading about prebiotic foods, and short chain fatty acids, I was thinking, 'I wonder if that's a prebiotic, and good food for the good bacteria in your colon'?

Then the instructor says he's going to dig around in the tree, and get some sago palm grubs to eat. He finds a bunch, and explains that he'll keep most of them alive until dinner, so that they didn't go bad, but there were a few that got mushed, and he was going to eat them right away. He eats them, and says that they taste sort of like fermented wood. I was thinking . . . 'that means that the bacteria in the grubs guts have digested the wood fiber, and turned it into a short chain fatty acid. I wonder if it's butyrate?' Later, at dinner, he cooks the rest of them over the fire, and comments that the grubs smell like butter, and taste a little lemony. 'It IS butyrate!' I think, very excited about my guess. Then I realize that I have been reading waaayyyy too much about prebiotics, and short chain fatty acids.