Always friendly and constructively active at and around WT:PHARM and Template talk:Infobox drug. Seppi was patient and persistent and succeeded in gaining the first pharmacology FA star in over three years.
I do not think "drug effects" is good as that also covers "medical uses" and the positive effects. Most people use the term "side effects" and "adverse effects" as synonyms. Some people argue that they have slightly different meanings, but I doubt most people agree. I am happy with either one of them. Would also support the use of "harmful effects" but should likely bring it to wider discussion before implementing. One could move the positive physical and psychological effects under a heading in "uses". Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:02, 23 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm. For now, change it to adverse effects in the 4 articles; while it seems a bit stupid to list effects like the ones I pointed out under that heading, one could argue that those effects can be considered "adverse" since what constitutes an undesired or harmful effect is subjective, whereas assertions about abuse and escalating doses are simply inconsistent with the definition of side effects. Alternatively, we could use "non-therapeutic effects" if that works for you. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 12:10, 23 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
"Adverse effects" has consensus. I have asked if Casliber is also good with that. Not a big fan of "non-therapeutic effects". Overly long and not commonly used. Other wise will make the change tomorrow if no concerns. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:22, 23 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
270° panorama overlooking La Jolla Shores Beach as seen from the Martin Johnson House, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, during a late August sunset. Photo by Gregg M. Erickson
Thanks for your comment here - I entirely agree - and also wow at your expertise with the addiction article. Was wondering if you had any time to review and/or comment here for the article I wrote and had a lot of help with, as I've been trying to improve the whole category. Aiming for FA nom at some point soon. Thanks so much :) --[E.3][chat2][me]10:53, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, I have compeletely rewritten the source code for this template, which should resolve the last regression from your report. And I dropped the parser function, using CSS only to transform letter case. Would you like to review my change? Thanks. -- Great Brightstar (talk) 09:53, 8 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing: I haven't actually looked at the data pages, but what I expect is that other language variants of WP conflate the 2 as one disorder, which would more accurately be termed a substance use disorder. If that's the issue, I'm not sure it'd be possible to accurately link the articles on addiction/dependence/SUD to the right wikidata item without revising, merging, and/or moving articles from other language variants of WP to match the article title with the scope of the article content. I might do more harm than good trying to fix that since I'd have to use machine-translation when editing other Wikipedias. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 18:25, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds complicated. I can tell that some of the titles are "wrong", but as you say, it's not necessarily clear whether the title accurately represents the subject of the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:09, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hey Seppi333, I have been meaning to contact you for a while now, with some questions about approaching a few articles, as I noticed on your user page that you may have some relevant experience. I have mainly edited bio related articles on wikipedia, but am looking to make a foray into statistics articles, because a number could use some revamping; specifically, Matrix calculus, structural equation modeling, factor analysis, and mixed models. Many of these articles fail to cite seminal articles, or key formulations of matrix differentiation (Magnus and Neudecker), and overall fail to link together with coherent notation, not even within each literature(i.e. factor analysis lit tends to use certain symbols and equations, but the factor analysis page ignores a lot of this). Do you have any recommendations about how to approach a project like this? I've started in my sandbox with FA here
Haha, I'm actually in the same boat as you when it comes to editing articles that are unrelated to my off-wiki skill set. In terms of editing those articles, the only thing you should really keep in mind is whether or not your edits are compliant with MOS:MATH. Everything else is pretty much the same as any other article in terms of citation policy. As for standardizing the notation with the literature, I don't see any problem with that and I'd encourage you to do that; you might want to just leave a note on the talk page explaining what you're doing if you completely revamp a section though. TaSeppi333 (Insert 2¢) 01:42, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.
I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org, so we can invite you in!
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Sorry this got a bit fraught. I didn't fix the dablink once I thought to check for it because opening that huge list to edit it gave me a wall of text of which the main message seemed to be that a simple change to that list would be inadequate and would be overwritten. I figured that as you knew what was going on you'd know how to sort it out. I think we now offer help to all sorts of readers with that dab page, whether they want a gene or internet slang (or an airport or an imprint).
Would you mind if we moved the Cathelicidin discussion from WT:MCB -> WT:MOLBIO, since it's a topic relevant to both the cell biologists and geneticists? No worries either way, but I'm hoping that centralising towards the main talkpage will also help keep cross-talk between the communities easier. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk05:39, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Puddleglum2.0 has given you a cookie! Cookies promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. You can spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a cookie, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend.
To spread the goodness of cookies, you can add {{subst:Cookie}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message, or eat this cookie on the giver's talk page with {{subst:munch}}!
This gives you 1.gene item, 2.item name, 3.HGNC name, 4.(optional)article name linked from gene item, 5.(optional)article name linked from protein item. Best--SCIdude (talk) 17:23, 19 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Also this gives you all family items with enwiki articles (453):
@Seppi333: I have finished work on several hundred WD items that were created from new articles in the early days. They are now integrated as well and should show up in the above queries. Also the 2nd query was updated with the classes restriction enzyme type, transmembrane transport protein superfamily, protein complex, group of protein complexes, family of protein complexes, protein fragment. So you might want to rerun the queries. --SCIdude (talk) 17:28, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This year's Reviewer of the Year is Rosguill. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.
Special commendation again goes to Onel5969 who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to Boleyn and JTtheOG who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.
Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.
Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.
(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)
Redirect autopatrol
A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by DannyS712 bot III.
Source Guide Discussion
Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.
This month's refresher course
While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of human protein-coding genes 1 until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits12:32, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed that you started a discussion here [1] some time ago. Would you be willing to check what the bot is doing if it will be reactivated? If so, I think we can ask user Fram to reactivate it. My very best wishes (talk) 22:47, 11 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It probably isn't necessary to reactivate the bot since the functionality for making new pages can be user-activated; the website/script for doing it is mentioned in the thread you linked. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 07:46, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Seppi333 and please excuse my very weak english.
First, let me thank you for your great contributions here, You are really an inspiration.
second, since you are an expert in this kind of stuff I have a question regarding images rights. commons doesn't accept NC-ND images like i was told here and i know that this image is a proprietary work.
my question is: are the rights of the image restricted to the file only, or does it extend to the informations in it? and can i create a SVG copy of it using Inkscape for the use in commons?
if not, is it OK to go around the rights by changing some details in the image I will creat (colors,Drawing of membranes, removing some enzymes....) and argue that it is my own work Based on informations I have read in several research papers and not
only on that image. Is changing the way of drawing images with rights and modiffing them a little an acceptable way or not?
Hi there. I'm pretty sure that the text on Commons is CC-BY-SA; the copyright license for the image itself is whatever license is listed on that page.
As for redrawing images, it's a bit more complicated. Unless you redraw it from scratch, the license for the original image applies to whatever you've modified. If the original license restricts modification, you can't legally republish a modified version of it. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 08:45, 10 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Momas: Re the rights of the image restricted to the file only, or does it extend to the informations in it? - sorry, for some reason I was thinking you were asking about images on Commons as opposed to images in general. The copyright applies to the image file itself and any copyrightable elements within an image. So, for example, if you create an image file depicting something and include actual prose within an image file, the file as whole and the prose are both copyrightable; the copyright holder can use different licenses for different copyrightable elements of an image, but that's not really that common. Unless the copyright holder indicates that there are multiple licenses which apply to different components of an image, a license for the image would also apply to all copyrightable elements within it.
Re and can i create a SVG copy of it using Inkscape for the use in commons? Absolutely. If you redraw an image, you own the copyright to your version. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 02:16, 17 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for being one of Wikipedia's top medical contributors!
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The 2019 Cure Award
In 2019 you were one of the top ~300 medical editors across any language of Wikipedia. Thank you from Wiki Project Med for helping bring free, complete, accurate, up-to-date health information to the public. We really appreciate you and the vital work you do! Wiki Project Med Foundation is a thematic organization whose mission is to improve our health content. Consider joining here, there are no associated costs.
NPP Sorting can be a great way to find pages needing new page patrolling that match your strengths and interests. Using ORES, it divides articles into topics such as Literature or Chemistry and on Geography. Take a look and see if you can find time to patrol a couple pages a day. With over 10,000 pages in the queue, the highest it's been since ACPERM, your help could really make a difference.
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A discussion on handling new article creation by paid editors is ongoing at the Village Pump.
Also at the Village Pump is a discussion about limiting participation at Articles for Deletion discussion.
Hello WikiProject Anatomy participant! This is our seventh newsletter, documenting what's going on in WikiProject Anatomy, news, current projects and other items of interest.
I value feedback, and if you think I've missed something, or don't wish to receive this again, please leave a note on my talk page, or remove your name from the mailing list.
We reach a project goal of 150 B-class articles in July 2020, increasing by about 50% over five years, and are one good article away from our goal of 40 GAs, doubling over the last five years
I have been asked to write up something introducing the Featured article (FA) process to anatomy editors, but I took a more general approach to explaining why one might want to contribute featured content and the benefits to the editor and to Wikipedia. I also tried to address some misconceptions about the FA process, and give you a guide that is somewhat specific to health content should you decide to take the dive.
A vital purpose of Featured articles is to serve as examples for new and aspiring Wikipedia editors. FAs are often uniquely comprehensive for the Internet. They showcase some of our best articles, and can enhance Wikipedia's reputation if they are maintained to standard—but in an "anyone can edit" environment, they can easily fall out of standard if not maintained. Benefits to the writer include developing collaborative partnerships and learning new skills, while improving your writing and seeing it exposed to a broader audience—all that Wikipedia is about!
Looking more specifically at WP Anatomy's featured content, the Featured media is impressive and seems to be an Anatomy Project strength. The Anatomy WikiProject has tagged 4 FAs, 1 Featured list, and 30 Featured media. Working towards upgrading and maintaining older Featured articles could be a worthwhile goal. Immune system is a 2007 FA promotion, and bringing it up to date would make a nice collaboration between WikiProject Medicine and the Anatomy WikiProject. Hippocampus is another dated promotion that is almost 50% larger than when promoted, having taken on a bit of uncited text and new text that might benefit from a tune-up.
This is your only warning; if you use Wikipedia for soapboxing, promotion or advertising again, you may be blocked from editing without further notice. It is entirely inappropriate to use WP to advertise positions to be filled. As an administrator, I have used my discretion and merely removed that portion of your postings. I see you did something of the sort in August. I have great respect for your contributions here, having originally been in this field myself, but WP is an encyclopedia and the talk pages and workgroups are for discussing contributions to the encyclopedia DGG ( talk ) 05:55, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@DGG: Recruiting an advisory board member is completely different than hiring; an advisor has no pre-defined job role/responsibility at a company. They literally just answer questions that are posed to them and offer advice/contacts of their own volition, which is incentivized by the upside potential of startup equity and the facilitation of that end by doing so. For another, they're not considered to be part of a C corporation's governing board under US law as the board of directors is or employed by the corporation a la its officers/agents or salaried/wage-earning employees who are hired for a particular job role at the company (NB: technically a founder could "co-found" a company and not be assigned a role/position in the articles of incorporation or do anything yet be issued equity, but that tends to entail rather bad outcomes).
Members of a board of advisors are basically investors who offer information as a service instead of capital to a company. An advisory board as a whole merely serves as a sounding board for ideas relevant to the backgrounds (i.e., functional areas) of the domains experts who compose it. I could have simply used Wikiproject talk pages as said sounding board every time I've have a topically-relevant question to see if anyone bites, but it's less annoying and far less spammy if I just target those inquiries toward Wikipedians with the relevant backgrounds, should there be any. Case in point: what happened with User talk:Doc James, with whom I now email and videoconference instead. I previously asked a question about pipetting hardware in one of those projects, but I ended up deleting the thread for the reasons I mentioned (addendum: my CSO also solved that problem a few days later anyway).
In spite of this, I can see why one might construe it as a promotional ad for a position at a company given that I offered equity and stated an incentive (i.e., upside potential), which is inherently promotional. While I'm sure any Wikipedian would volunteer information I'm looking for willingly if they had it (given that it's what practically all content editors do), it's conventional for an early stage startup company to offer ~0.5-1.0% of its equity (which is almost always completely worthless; ours is $0.0001/share and my entire company is worth $1) in exchange for ongoing advice. The reason that's done is that it incentivizes the provision of more useful/thoughtful responses to informational requests and network contacts they'd otherwise not provide, as that worthless paper gains value if the company successful. I also wanted to avoid taking advantage of other Wikipedians' informational generosity merely because we're all volunteers that aim to provide free, accurate, and up-to-date information to our readers here on Wikipedia. Hence, my equity offer.
Preventing me from making such offers to discuss topics - which are relevant to both my company and the WikiProjects I post them to - privately is merely going to make me discuss said topics publicly on WP more despite the liability it can potentially pose if I fail to frame the question appropriately. I've already done so more times than I've requested an advisor over the past few months. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 13:17, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have to agree DGG. I deeply respect your contributions, but adverts on Wiki Project talk pages are completely inappropriate. Boghog (talk) 17:56, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, I suppose my perspective on how affiliated organizations support/regard entrepreneurialism among their members has been a bit biased by my experiences over the last 4 months; perhaps I would have thought differently otherwise, although I have received support privately. In any event, if that’s how the community generally considers that behavior, mea culpa. I’ll still pursue the info I need if I think I can get it here from a project, but I won’t offer anything for it. That’s the way I’ve always approached things here that pertain to my off-wiki life.
First of all, I want to apologize for automatically using so strong a warning--the templates are fixed-wording, but there were other ones available, and I should have used them. I recognize your confusion, for most volunteer activities are a little different than Wikipedia The English WP has from the beginning been a project focussed on amateurs. From the earliest days, professionals have participated, but there's a strong social attitude that everyone here is equal, and that people here with professional roles or as experts should not try to dominate. There is also a very strong attitude here of non-commercialism--we are not exactly hostile to commercial organizations, but we tend to go very carefully with them. I soon learned it was probably better to participate in other areas than my own professional field of library science--as a just-retired teacher of the subject, I wanted to encourage my students develop, but I also expected to be in charge, and that doesn't work here.
In the last few years, there's been a tendency towards increased professional participation in several areas, most notably medicine. We're delighted to have the expertise, but expertise has to be shown, not asserted. The eventual result was the formation of a new affiliated organization,Wiki Project Med [6] within the movement.
I've been member of the advisory boards of several publishers , and it was not as a potential investor, but as a very significant customer. There was potential conflict of interest, and I and the other librarians on these boards considered essentially as mutual benefit; scientific journal publishing is an oligopoly, and their intention was not that we buy more journals -- for we all always bought as many as we could afford in any case -- but that they could find out what we wanted, so that at least we wouldn't cancel subscriptions, and we could try to persuade them to do what we wanted, so we could justify subscriptions.We had a marginal influence. . We were never paid, at least in money, but entertained in a generous way, as judged by academic standards. We all did recognize there was a potential conflict, and I accordingly declined one or two such offers.
My main current activity here is in dealing with people who want to insert promotional articles for the companies or professional practices, and especially the paid PR writers, and most especially the paid PR writers who pretend to be volunteers. The basic approach of the English WP is to be quite intolerant of such activities and such material. I therefore did indeed pick up specifically on the offer of money. There is considerable discussion here of what exactly constitutes a volunteer for those who may be employed by some aspect of the movement in some related capacity, but the one thing really avoided is mention of money. Even the WMF, when it wants to advertise a paid position, does it via some other channel than the actual encyclopedia, such as one of the related mailing lists or blogs or their own wiki.
And , by the way, I agree with you that articles on routine laboratory equipment is a particularly difficult range of subject to write about, partially because of the lack of sources other than manufactuerer's advertisements. Given the sources, it is possible to write an informative article, and if you're in a position to help here, I can give some further advice. DGG ( talk ) 09:44, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@DGG: Re: First of all, I want to apologize for automatically using so strong a warning--the templates are fixed-wording, but there were other ones available, and I should have used them. Heh, no hard feelings. I appreciate the sentiment.
Re: From the earliest days, professionals have participated, but there's a strong social attitude that everyone here is equal, and that people here with professional roles or as experts should not try to dominate. ... We're delighted to have the expertise, but expertise has to be shown, not asserted. I 100% agree on both points. The reason I posted that on Wikipedia is that I know that (1) there are a lot of smart people here, (2) the vast majority of us are autodidacts, (3) some of us have PhDs or professional roles in analytical chemistry, MCB, genomics, or bioinformatics, and (4) some of us are self-taught domain experts. If the 4th wasn't true, I wouldn't have received requests from professors and industry professionals to reuse my work in neuroscience textbooks (via private email) and pharmacology colloquium presentations (via my talk page) or have been plagiarized on several occasions by various groups of academics/authors (the latter mostly pertains to material I've written in the articles on trace amines, TAARs, and amphetamine; I'm sure it's happened more times than the handful of instances I've discovered, but only one group did it egregiously enough to cause me to enforce my copyright - e.g., see the images they used).
Re: I've been member of the advisory boards of several publishers , and it was not as a potential investor, but as a very significant customer. Advisory boards for established corporations and even different types of corporations and businesses differ from startup advisory boards. Even among startups, a 501(c)(3) advisory board is going to operate a lot differently than for-profit (S/B/C) corporations. VCs won't really invest in a company if they aren't incorporated as a Delaware C corporation, so most for-profit startups, like us, are incorporated as such in Delaware.
Re: My main current activity here is in dealing with people who want to insert promotional articles for the companies or professional practices, and especially the paid PR writers, and most especially the paid PR writers who pretend to be volunteers. Honestly, I think promotional articles and advertising on Wikipedia are wholly pointless as a mode of business marketing for revenue generation. Even if I didn't think that way, engaging in such practices would violate my integrity; right now, I have a COI in relation to the use of third-generation sequencers as part of an in vitro diagnostic medical device for infectious diseases, but you won't catch me dead trying to advance my company's or business partners' interests in my edits to the mainspace if only for that reason alone. Being a for-profit startup CEO might make me a de-facto capitalist, but I am still a Wikipedian. I place exactly equal value on my company's interests and Wikipedia's interests and will never edit the mainspace in a manner that begets a COI for the former, the latter, or both.
Re: the one thing really avoided is mention of money. Even the WMF, when it wants to advertise a paid position, does it via some other channel than the actual encyclopedia Fair point. I should've recognized that. My bad.
Re: I agree with you that articles on routine laboratory equipment is a particularly difficult range of subject to write about, partially because of the lack of sources other than manufactuerer's advertisements. Given the sources, it is possible to write an informative article, and if you're in a position to help here, I can give some further advice. Heh, if I had the background knowledge, I wouldn't be looking for expert advisors. That being said, I'm actually looking for two: one to advise us on a protocol for the uniform lysis of all known human pathogens (~1400 species) and one for a DNA/RNA depletion protocol (NB: I am looking for something more specific than the latter, but the details are proprietary; I am going to pose a question to MCB/MOLBIO relevant to that within the next day or two though). What I should've done is contacted authors of the publications in each subdomain that I've identified as being established experts that actively conduct research in those areas of NGS sample preparation. I suppose I should've done that in the first place instead of posting here. Also, while I have no problem with expanding sample preparation (analytical chemistry) at some point in the future – and I probably will do so when the time comes – doing so right now is actually a COI for me as it pertains to my company's IP; this is because we will need to conduct primary/original research to identify said protocols and then commercialize them for use with our device. I'd only be willing to expand that article as it pertains to sample preparation for DNA/RNA sequencing (which will become the scope of my domain expertise) after said COI for my company is a non-issue in ~12–18 months from now. I don't currently have or foresee me having any COI in the future that might affect what or bias how I write about that topic with respect to Wikipedia's interests, so I don't expect WP:COI to be an issue; however, if it is, I will disclose it in advance and avoid editing that article if necessary. Addendum – just to clarify what I'm saying in this last point: I have a reason not to work on this article right now. I don't even have time to work on articles at the moment anyway, so I wouldn't be able to do so regardless. My monthly edit history statistics illustrate just how much time I've had to spare over the past 6 months for WP editing relative to the preceding 7 years. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 00:20, 15 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the redirect whitelist.
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
NPP Technical Achievement Award
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
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My father, a retired ER doctor, actually died on January 2nd from bacterial pneumonia complicated by a pleural empyema; all 4 my siblings and I contracted his pneumonia shortly afterward. Nonetheless, my hope is that my brother and I can invest part of the substantial inheritance we received from him into our business to reduce the prevalence death by pneumonia - and all other treatable infectious diseases for that matter - in the future. That's what keeps me going at least.
Anyway, I should be back on Wikipedia at some point in the future. I still intermittently run my bot to edit the human protein-coding gene lists though. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 03:10, 30 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that you've added some links pointing to disambiguation pages. Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)
It's nice to see we have some common ground. :0) I didn't earn three degrees at Univ. of Maryland, College Park, but I did earn one! (B.S. Psychology, 1985). My youngest brother grew up in Potomac - he graduated high school in 1992. All the best, Mark D Worthen PsyD(talk) [he/his/him]17:27, 27 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Please join this discussion - there is increase in the abuse of Wikipedia and its processes by POV pushers, Paid Editors, and by holders of various user rights including Autopatrolled. Even our review systems themselves at AfC and NPR have been infiltrated. The good news is that detection is improving, but the downside is that it creates the need for a huge clean up - which of course adds to backlogs.
Copyright violations are also a serious issue. Most non-regular contributors do not understand why, and most of our Reviewers are not experts on copyright law - and can't be expected to be, but there is excellent, easy-to-follow advice on COPYVIO detection here.
At the time of the last newsletter (#25, December 2020) the backlog was only just over 2,000 articles. New Page Review is an official system. It's the only firewall against the inclusion of new, improper pages.
There are currently 706 New Page Reviewers plus a further 1,080 admins, but as much as nearly 90% of the patrolling is still being done by around only the 20 or so most regular patrollers.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process or its software.
Various awards are due to be allocated by the end of the year and barnstars are overdue. If you would like to manage this, please let us know. Indeed, if you are interested in coordinating NPR, it does not involve much time and the tasks are described here.
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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Hi Sepi333, I was working in the backlog and noticed a citation error for File:HMB_biosynthesis_and_metabolism_diagram.png. If you could kindly update the image's second reference name to read "HMB athletic performance-related effects 2011 review", it would be much appreciated. Thanks, Heartmusic678 (talk) 17:08, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I am Piotr Konieczny, a sociologist of new media at Hanyang University (and User:Piotrus on Wikipedia). I would like to better understand Wikipedia's volunteers who edit medical topics, many associated with the WikiProject Medicine, and known to create some of the highest quality content on Wikipedia. I hope that the lessons I can learn from you that I will present to the academic audience will benefit both the WikiProject Medicine (improving your understanding of yourself and helping to promote it and attract new volunteers) and the wider world of medical volunteering and academia. Open access copy of the resulting research will be made available at WikiProject's Medicine upon the completion of the project.
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Please note that by filling out this questionnaire, you consent to participate in this research. The survey is anonymous and all personal details relevant to your experience will be kept private and will not be transferred to any third party.
I appreciate your support of this research and thank you in advance for taking the time to participate and share your experiences! If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me at my Wikipedia user page or through my email listed on the survey page (or by Wikipedia email this user function).
You're invited to a zoom call, taking place on February 11, with the goal of improving the article on Los Angeles to Featured article status! I often find it daunting to approach the Big Subjects on my own—so if you, like me, want a time to sit down with fellow dedicated editors and tackle something important and complex, this is the zoom for you! I, unfortunately, have no way to transmit snacks over zoom; but I trust you to exercise good judgement and discretion in selecting snacks of your own. Hope to see you there—if you're interested, add your name here!
@Seppi333: Greetings! I see that you are a major contributor of Dopamine. The article has two citation needed tags, both in the lede. Could you take care of them if you have time? There may be references supporting them in the body. Cheers. Wretchskull (talk) 13:42, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
At the time of the last newsletter (No.26, September 2021), the backlog was 'only' just over 6,000 articles. In the past six months, the backlog has reached nearly 16,000, a staggering level not seen in several years. A very small number of users had been doing the vast majority of the reviews. Due to "burn-out", we have recently lost most of this effort. Furthermore, several reviewers have been stripped of the user right for abuse of privilege and the articles they patrolled were put back in the queue.
Several discussions on the state of the process have taken place on the talk page, but there has been no action to make any changes. The project also lacks coordination since the "position" is vacant.
In the last 30 days, only 100 reviewers have made more than 8 patrols and only 50 have averaged one review a day. There are currently 804 New Page Reviewers, but about a third have not had any activity in the past month. All 853 administrators have this permission, but only about a dozen significantly contribute to NPP.
This means we have an active pool of about 450 to address the backlog. We cannot rely on a few to do most of the work as that inevitably leads to burnout. A fairly experienced reviewer can usually do a review in a few minutes. If every active reviewer would patrol just one article per day, the backlog would very quickly disappear.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, do suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
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You're receiving this message because you have conducted 5+ good article reviews or participated in previous backlog drives. Click here to opt out of any future messages.
At the time of the last newsletter (No.27, May 2022), the backlog was approaching 16,000, having shot up rapidly from 6,000 over the prior two months. The attention the newsletter brought to the backlog sparked a flurry of activity. There was new discussion on process improvements, efforts to invite new editors to participate in NPP increased and more editors requested the NPP user right so they could help, and most importantly, the number of reviews picked up and the backlog decreased, dipping below 14,000[a] at the end of May.
Since then, the news has not been so good. The backlog is basically flat, hovering around 14,200. I wish I could report the number of reviews done and the number of new articles added to the queue. But the available statistics we have are woefully inadequate. The only real number we have is the net queue size.[b]
In the last 30 days, the top 100 reviewers have all made more than 16 patrols (up from 8 last month), and about 70 have averaged one review a day (up from 50 last month).
While there are more people doing more reviews, many of the ~730 with the NPP right are doing little. Most of the reviews are being done by the top 50 or 100 reviewers. They need your help. We appreciate every review done, but please aim to do one a day (on average, or 30 a month).
Backlog drive
A backlog reduction drive, coordinated by buidhe and Zippybonzo, will be held from July 1 to July 31. Sign up here. Barnstars will be awarded.
TIP – New school articles
Many new articles on schools are being created by new users in developing and/or non-English-speaking countries. The authors are probably not even aware of Wikipedia's projects and policy pages. WP:WPSCH/AG has some excellent advice and resources specifically written for these users. Reviewers could consider providing such first-time article creators with a link to it while also mentioning that not all schools pass the GNG and that elementary schools are almost certainly not notable.
Misc
There is a new template available, {{NPP backlog}}, to show the current backlog. You can place it on your user or talk page as a reminder:
Very high unreviewed pages backlog: 11887 articles, as of 04:00, 10 November 2024 (UTC), according to DatBot
There has been significant discussion at WP:VPP recently on NPP-related matters (Draftification, Deletion, Notability, Verifiability, Burden). Proposals that would somewhat ease the burden on NPP aren't gaining much traction, although there are suggestions that the role of NPP be fundamentally changed to focus only on major CSD-type issues.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
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After the last newsletter (No.28, June 2022), the backlog declined another 1,000 to 13,000 in the last week of June. Then the July backlog drive began, during which 9,900 articles were reviewed and the backlog fell by 4,500 to just under 8,500 (these numbers illustrate how many new articles regularly flow into the queue). Thanks go to the coordinators Buidhe and Zippybonzo, as well as all the nearly 100 participants. Congratulations to Dr vulpes who led with 880 points. See this page for further details.
Unfortunately, most of the decline happened in the first half of the month, and the backlog has already risen to 9,600. Understandably, it seems many backlog drive participants are taking a break from reviewing and unfortunately, we are not even keeping up with the inflow let alone driving it lower. We need the other 600 reviewers to do more! Please try to do at least one a day.
Coordination
MB and Novem Linguae have taken on some of the coordination tasks. Please let them know if you are interested in helping out. MPGuy2824 will be handling recognition, and will be retroactively awarding the annual barnstars that have not been issued for a few years.
Open letter to the WMF
The Page Curation software needs urgent attention. There are dozens of bug fixes and enhancements that are stalled (listed at Suggested improvements). We have written a letter to be sent to the WMF and we encourage as many patrollers as possible to sign it here. We are also in negotiation with the Board of Trustees to press for assistance. Better software will make the active reviewers we have more productive.
TIP - Reviewing by subject
Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages by their most familiar subjects can do so from the regularly updated sorted topic list.
New reviewers
The NPP School is being underused. The learning curve for NPP is quite steep, but a detailed and easy-to-read tutorial exists, and the Curation Tool's many features are fully described and illustrated on the updated page here.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
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For those who may have missed it in our last newsletter, here's a quick reminder to see the letter we have drafted, and if you support it, do please go ahead and sign it. If you already signed, thanks. Also, if you haven't noticed, the backlog has been trending up lately; all reviews are greatly appreciated.
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Much has happened since the last newsletter over two months ago. The open letter finished with 444 signatures. The letter was sent to several dozen people at the WMF, and we have heard that it is being discussed but there has been no official reply. A related article appears in the current issue of The Signpost. If you haven't seen it, you should, including the readers' comment section.
Awards: Barnstars were given for the past several years (thanks to MPGuy2824), and we are now all caught up. The 2021 cup went to John B123 for leading with 26,525 article reviews during 2021. To encourage moderate activity, a new "Iron" level barnstar is awarded annually for reviewing 360 articles ("one-a-day"), and 100 reviews earns the "Standard" NPP barnstar. About 90 reviewers received barnstars for each of the years 2018 to 2021 (including the new awards that were given retroactively). All awards issued for every year are listed on the Awards page. Check out the new Hall of Fame also.
Software news: Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have connected with WMF developers who can review and approve patches, so they have been able to fix some bugs, and make other improvements to the Page Curation software. You can see everything that has been fixed recently here. The reviewer report has also been improved.
NPP backlog May – October 15, 2022
Suggestions:
There is much enthusiasm over the low backlog, but remember that the "quality and depth of patrolling are more important than speed".
Reminder: an article should not be tagged for any kind of deletion for a minimum of 15 minutes after creation and it is often appropriate to wait an hour or more. (from the NPP tutorial)
Reviewers should focus their effort where it can do the most good, reviewing articles. Other clean-up tasks that don't require advanced permissions can be left to other editors that routinely improve articles in these ways (creating Talk Pages, specifying projects and ratings, adding categories, etc.) Let's rely on others when it makes the most sense. On the other hand, if you enjoy doing these tasks while reviewing and it keeps you engaged with NPP (or are guiding a newcomer), then by all means continue.
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Backlog:
Saving the best for last: From a July low of 8,500, the backlog climbed back to 11,000 in August and then reversed in September dropping to below 6,000 and continued falling with the October backlog drive to under 1,000, a level not seen in over four years. Keep in mind that there are 2,000 new articles every week, so the number of reviews is far higher than the backlog reduction. To keep the backlog under a thousand, we have to keep reviewing at about half the recent rate!
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Hello! Voting in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 12 December 2022. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations to WaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. See this page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.
2022 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar. Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!
Minimum deletion time: The previous WP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification and WP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in the feed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)
New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendly explanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit your common.js or vector.js file from User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js to User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js
Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, see this guide, this checklist, and spend some time at WP:RFD.
Discussions with the WMF The PageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitted dozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such as Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team also had a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discuss revamping the landing pages that new users see.
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Thank you for your incredible contributions to amphetamine-related topics. I have definitely learned a lot from those articles :-) --WikiLinuz {talk} 08:15, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with 23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to 0 (momentarily). Congratulations to Hey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed by Meena and Greyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. See this page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.
Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for them here.
WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team, consisting of Sam, Jason and Susana, and also some patches from Jon, has been hard at work updating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-in beta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite of Special:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details at WT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.
Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are now automatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply at WT:AFCP like was required previously). To install the AFC helper script, visit Special:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visit Special:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.
You can review the AFC workflow at WP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget that draftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.
Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their own SNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists is WP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).
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The New Page Patrol team is sending you this impromptu message to inform you of a steeply rising backlog of articles needing review. If you have any extra time to spare, please consider reviewing one or two articles each day to help lower the backlog. You can start reviewing by visiting Special:NewPagesFeed. Thank you very much for your help.
I can't remember if it was you, or somebody else, but I recall reading somewhere that physical exercise (at least, aerobic exercise) can inhibit or potentially reverse amphetamine tolerance. Is this true? If so, do you happen to know what mechanism(s) produce(s) this? Off the top of my head, the main thing that comes to mind is what's stated in the NB of PE article whereby the urinary metabolite of phenethylamine dramatically increases, in addition to the fact that according to this source, the urinary metabolite of phenethylamine positively measures the treatment response to amphetamine for ADHD. I'm not too familiar with other mechanisms involved, if any.
In any event, I'm actually not sure of the significance of this inhibition and/or reversal of tolerance in a clinical/treatment context either. I'm under the impression that tolerance only develops to a handful of cognitive and physical effects (e.g., the anorectic effect, euphoria [when not exercising], the increased 'liking' affect [as opposed to 'wanting' which I believe undergoes sensitization and produces outcomes such as preferred placement conditioning which can clinically manifest as improved school attendance, among other things], and now I'm gonna stop listing things because I've lost my train of thought, excuse my pathological lack of proof reading lol).
I'm also under the impression that tolerance doesn't develop to some effects, like the aforementioned 'wanting' aspect of motivation, as well as the degree of promoted cognitive arousal at a given dose unless one has been awake for a number of days (as opposed to just moderate sleep deprivation [i.e., slept 5-6 hours instead of 8-9] where one will wont feel as 'awake' on their prescribed dose of amphetamine due to starting from a worse baseline of having slept less the previous night), so I don't know if physical exercise would be relevant for augmenting this drug effect.
In saying that, does this inhibition or reduction of tolerance, for whatever effects happen to go under tolerance, have a notable effect? My understanding is that tolerance is amphetamine just plateaus after the indicated FDA/manufacturer 7 day period for titration and that patients can just take their dose everyday and receive the drug effect with trivial differences that are related to one's day-to-day homeostasis. But if it does reduce tolerance and has a notable effect, can this be distinguished between the adjunctive effects exercise confers from just dumping the brain with additional NE and DA? (i.e., this is discussed in the 'sweat it out' sys review that I think you cited back in the day). Is this all a case of it can't be answered assertively because some things haven't been studied? I don't mind if you want to answer with a "well, theoretically speaking". It's not like this is going on the amphetamine article anyway. Also, is all remotely coherent? Apologies if not, I'm writing this at 4 am and my own medication has long run its course.
Also, out of curiosity, is the Narcolepsy revision for the amphetamine article just a case of everyone biding their time for a review to come out that states a specific a degree of treatment efficacy, rather than just asserting treatment efficacy outright? I ask because I wanna have a crack at drafting some of it on my actual account, not the logged out IP user state that I use for asking incoherent questions at 4 AM.
THANKS! And... um... good luck with reading this all... My sincerest apologies in advance lmao
lol... Exercise decreases amphetamine reward sensitization and - as a consequence - self-administration, which is technically a reduction in tolerance, but it's to a very specific drug effect. Psychostimulant self-administration is tightly linked to the neuropsychological effects induced by higher levels of ΔFosB expression. Covered here: Amphetamine#Behavioral treatments and other parts of the addiction section. I don't know to what extent it decreases other forms of drug tolerance, and I can't really speak to what extent it might since I haven't read much research on this topic beyond that. It's not likely to be an active area of research given how niche the research topic of "neuropsychological effects of physical exercise on responses to amphetamine" is. As to how it does that, it's much more likely to be a result of skeletal muscle acting like an endocrine gland during physical activity through the secretion of myokines. It secretes a fair number of blood-brain barrier-permeable and/or blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier-permeable neurotrophic factors, among hundreds of other cytokines and hormones that can access the brain from the periphery. I can't really point to any one of them in particular as being primarily responsible, but that is the only feasible mechanism through which long-term neuroplastic and behavioral changes could be induced by exercise and impinge upon the behavioral response to amphetamine and ΔFosB/c-Fos immunoreactivity (gene expression) in the striatum.
I don't think phenethylamine has much involvement in anything beyond the short-term effects of physical exercise. Lower brain PEA levels may have some involvement in ADHD, but increasing those levels transiently wouldn't induce long-term neuroplasticity, particularly considering how short a half-life phenethylamine has. It probably has some involvement in mediating euphoria, but I can't say to what extent. Even so, since euphoria requires simultaneous activation of distinct hedonic hotspots in the human brain - which respond to non-identical neurochemical inputs - it's implausible that just one compound could cause it. It's more likely to be caused by a multitude of endogenous euphoriant compounds like phenethylamine, endocannabinoids, endogenous opiates, etc. that are released from different tissue sites during exercise, which in turn induce a euphoriant effect by acting on distinct hedonic hotspots simultaneously.
Tolerance to most of amphetamine's drug effects does plateau at therapeutic doses, but given how mild the level of tolerance is, I don't really think a short-term or even a persistent reversal of amphetamine tolerance at therapeutic doses is particularly notable. It's not like sudden cessation of intake produces an even remotely remarkable withdrawal syndrome; the cessation of treatment-related drug effects is likely much more noticeable than any withdrawal-related drug effects. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 20:46, 27 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, Seppi. I appreciate the thorough reply. I think I must've picked up this idea on Reddit; that forum seems to be a bit of a wild west when it comes to neuropharmacology discussion, to put it politely. I think this also indirectly addresses my belief that magnesium helped inhibit/reverse tolerance (at therapeutic doses) as well, through NMDA antagonism. This came up a lot off wikipedia as well, but I'm guessing that, like exercise, magnesium serves to reduce psychostimulant self-administration in high-dose use through impinging upon the NMDAR signaling pathway for ΔFosB (ignoring the DRD1 signaling pathway via chronic dopamine accumulation).
Anyway, the main reason I'm replying again is that I wanted to get your thoughts on this case study (PMID: 8545689) that I came across the other day. It's on high dose dextroamphetamine use for the treatment of ADHD, but the doses used are higher than I've ever observed before (I've heard of 100-150mg a day of MAS being used for Narcolepsy, but not ADHD). Nearly 30 patients were taking doses upwards of 230mg/day, or, with relevance to weight, 3.6mg/kg. Furthermore, there was a illustrative case that went further into detail and described a patient who got titrated to 55mg/day for a clinical response when beginning treatment at 13, before later ending up on 180mg/day (2mg/kg) 4 years later.
Is this incredibly unusual? Whilst I understand that dosing is up to clinical discretion and that treatment effects beyond 1mg/kg or 60mg/day don't plateau universally in those with ADHD, I don't understand how taking over 3mg/kg a day, or 200mg a day, isn't causing ΔFosB to accumulate in these patients to produce addiction plasticity and manifest addiction-like behavior (especially because this case study examined years of patient's progress), or how these doses are not causing cognitive impairment from taking doses that are anywhere from 2-3x the therapeutic recommendation, or how there aren't any significant adverse effects reported besides insomnia and anorexia, that seem to dissipate after several weeks/months after starting treatment.
Now, I understand that case reports/studies are essentially bottom of the barrel evidence. I just can't wrap my head around how it's being observed that doses that high are being administered with success, when ADHD typically necessitates low doses to increase dopamine/norepinephrine levels modestly. 103.51.113.25 (talk) 06:39, 30 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Heh, I used to write on a neuropharmacology forum every so often, though that was years ago. Think it was called Bluelight or something similar. I've read a lot more research papers than most people, and talking with others about research has led me to the realization that a lot of people with less experience reading/writing/synthesizing research misinterpret things. If the paper topic interests you enough, best to read the paper yourself to confirm your/their understanding.
Anyway, sorry for the long-delayed follow-up on this. I was going to reply earlier, but work, the stimulant medication shortage, and forgetfulness all got in the way of a more expedient response. My bad.
Before I respond, I should give you some context. I should probably state upfront that I've suffered from a ruinously compulsive addiction involving amphetamine, so this does bias my answer. Also, the likelihood of developing an addiction is (obviously) dose-dependent, but it's also strongly gene-dependent, so individual addiction risk for every addictive drug varies from person to person.[1] A mildly supratherapeutic dose that could lead one person to develop a pathological compulsion to use a drug - possibly in combination with performing a rewarding cross-sensitizing behavior - could be perfectly fine for another person. Keep increasing the dose for the 2nd person, and eventually they'll cross their own genetic loading threshold, though. So, to be frank, until an accurate model to evaluate a patient-specific maximum dose based on individual genetic risk for prescription stimulants is developed, I think it would be dangerous if all patients were permitted to take higher doses like this for extended periods. If prescribing limits were increased before patient-specific risk could be accurately assessed, then I believe the change in policy would markedly increase the incidence of prescription stimulant addiction in the ADHD population relative to the current rate.
Regarding that trial, 3.6 mg/kg is an insanely high dose of Adderall or dextroamphamine salts IMO. Even if that were brand/generic Vyvanse, that would be on the exceedingly high end, but as amphetamine itself, that dose is likely to begin inducing a noticeable desire - though not necessarily a compulsive one (again, very person-specific) - to take the drug if taken regularly for a few weeks. It's worth mentioning that some of the therapeutic effects of amphetamines are only obtainable at lower doses (e.g., ~60 mg/day). Taking higher doses will still continue to improve wakefulness (cognitive arousal) and task salience (the amount of motivational salience - specifically, incentive salience - your brain assigns to initiating & maintaining the performance of any given task) in a dose-dependent manner, but higher doses can also be detrimental to attentional networks and working memory. For me personally, that threshold is around 120 mg/day of instant-release Adderall. The Hebbian version of the Yerkes-Dodson law proposes a similar idea of an inverted U-shaped relationship between arousal and task performance. I don't think anxiety really has any bearing on dose-dependent improvements in task performance following amphetamine use unless an individual also happens to experience anxiety on higher doses; I almost never feel anxious while under the effect of a stimulant medication. That said, this is a psychological model, not a neuropharmacological one, so I'm just pointing out that this is an analogous phenomenon to the one I described. Anyway, the main point I'm trying to make is that - depending on the type of work a person does - more medication is not necessarily be better for improving task performance.
I started developing my addiction in 2013. It slowly built up to a ruinously compulsive form of use from 2014-2016, which is around the same time I was rewriting the bulk of the articles on amphetamine and addiction (the latter of which has since been heavily edited since my revisions). Not surprisingly, I focused on addiction and the pathological changes it induces in the brain during the development and maintenance phase. The maximum daily dose I used at the height of my addiction - which on average lasted about 10 days - plateaued around 180 mg/day, or 3x my prescribed daily dose. For context, I wasn't using the drug as a euphoriant, and I wasn't so much addicted to the drug itself as I was addicted to using it while engaging in a strongly reward cross-sensitizing behavior. The best way I can describe it is that exposure to the drug stimulus amplified my desire to engage in the behavioral stimulus and vice versa. It's not exactly a novel phenomenon since it's been documented in users of prescription amphetamines, substituted amphetamines, and dopaminergic drugs more generally, but I'd rather not go into detail about my experience with it on my talk page. I wrote about specific drug/behavioral reward cross-sensitization effects and even the form of addiction I experienced enough in the amphetamine article (e.g., Amphetamine#Biomolecular mechanisms) that you can probably figure out what I'm referring to.
As you probably surmised, I recovered, and I still use instant-release prescription amphetamines. In the event you ever encounter someone in a similar situation, managing a prescription drug addiction is entirely possible; the way to effectively address it depends on an individual's housing and socioeconomic situation, but it basically just entails a solution that effectively handicaps one's ability to self-administer more than a fixed daily dose. Relying on a roommate/partner who can manage one’s intake every day (and is willing to put up with a certain amount of bullshit) is the simplest - but not always the easiest - means of managing/limiting prescription drug intake. A locked steel medication dispenser (e.g., an e-pill safe) is an option that provides much more flexibility/independence, and it really only requires having a friend who will hold the keys and provide access to them every 30 days or so.
I can't say at what long-term daily dose I'd become addicted to amphetamine itself for its euphoric effect since - as I mentioned before - there is currently no model capable of accurately evaluating a threshold dose based on my individual genetic loading for amphetamine addiction. But, a 3.6 mg/kg weight-based dose is even higher than the maximum daily dose at which my intake plateaued when I was taking Adderall while engaging in a reward cross-sensitizing behavior in a ruinously compulsive manner. So, if I were prescribed 3.6 mg/kg/day for an extended period of time, it's likely that my addiction would’ve become worse than it was.
^Nestler EJ (December 2013). "Cellular basis of memory for addiction". Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience. 15 (4): 431–443. PMC3898681. PMID24459410. Despite the importance of numerous psychosocial factors, at its core, drug addiction involves a biological process: the ability of repeated exposure to a drug of abuse to induce changes in a vulnerable brain that drive the compulsive seeking and taking of drugs, and loss of control over drug use, that define a state of addiction. ... A large body of literature has demonstrated that such ΔFosB induction in D1-type [nucleus accumbens] neurons increases an animal's sensitivity to drug as well as natural rewards and promotes drug self-administration, presumably through a process of positive reinforcement ... Another ΔFosB target is cFos: as ΔFosB accumulates with repeated drug exposure it represses c-Fos and contributes to the molecular switch whereby ΔFosB is selectively induced in the chronic drug-treated state.41 ... Moreover, there is increasing evidence that, despite a range of genetic risks for addiction across the population, exposure to sufficiently high doses of a drug for long periods of time can transform someone who has relatively lower genetic loading into an addict.
It’s probably worth mentioning that I’m never one who minds large volumes of text; I fancy a good info dump every now and again myself and anyone who knows me/texts me at least somewhat infrequently will corroborate my preference for elaboration (it can be summarised perfectly with this meme) Furthermore, I also don’t mind the wait between replies, because, naturally, circumstances off-wiki/online should take priority and in any event, I reckon that I would get more out of reading 3 thoroughly circumstantiated replies, over the course of 6 months, as opposed to 10 really brief and ambiguous replies over the course of a week. Not to mention that I appreciate the work that you’ve done on this site, for reasons that are beyond just making Wikipedia better in general, that I’ll get into below.
First things first, I deeply respect the human element of your answer. This is actually a very full circle moment for me, given that the reason I know of you/got familiar with your username was because I had previously used Wikipedia as a reference for possible directions regarding my own pathologically-reinforced problem with the aforementioned cross-sensitising stimulus. But, instead of amphetamine being paired with it via learned association, it was cannabis that had been paired via Pavlovian-instrumental transfer. This was around the time when everything had just been shut down in 2020 (50% weighting of environmental risk factors for addiction and all that…) that my cannabis addiction ended up developing into smoking cannabis and immediately engaging in xyz behaviour.
In the midst of it all, I wanted to find research papers and/or documented experiences regarding what I was going through, so Wikipedia was one of the moves; I already had a brilliant experience using Wikipedia after I got prescribed dexamphetamine, because the article and its accompanying citations basically addressed most of the concerns that I had about potential long-term adverse events of taking amphetamine (i.e., I started treatment at 18, so it was a case of lack of prior long-term experience taking that substance in adolescence + the mainstream discourse that I was exposed to whilst growing up [RE: adverse health effects from chronic psychostimulant use] was quite skewed given that Australia has a significant problem with recreational use of substituted amphetamines, to say the least). Anyway, I knew your username from the amphetamine talk page (for obvious reasons; you’re on every archived page being questioned about alleged amphetamine neurotoxicity, like you had been subpoenaed for a congressional hearing into the topic), so, seeing your posts on the talk pages of the addiction-related articles was both welcome and almost absurdly coincidental, in the sense that a great fraction of the addiction-related content that was posted in those places was so perfectly curated for my situation. It’s probably worth mentioning that I ended up no longer smoking just a few months later and that’s, probably, largely attributed to having picked up several hours of aerobic exercise daily (again, covid). I imagine moving house also probably helped somewhat because of associative learning, environmental drug cues blah blah blah…
Here’s something that I would like to get your opinion on regarding addiction and cross-sensitisation. So, I don’t think I’ve ever developed an amphetamine cross-sensisited addiction to the behaviour you're talking about (NB: I definitely have an amplified incentive salience, but I can still and actively do exert inhibitory control for greater priorities;TMK inhibitory control should only fail when ΔFosB is sufficiently overexpressed), however, there is another behaviour that I’m unsure if pathological reinforcement to is possible and/or notable. The behaviour I’m talking about is physical exercise, particularly aerobic exercise.
So, for some additional context, I’ve never taken a dose of dexamphetamine beyond 60mg/day. I’m prescribed 50mg/day of dexamphetamine and take that dose most days, but will occasionally take 60mg/day in the event that I’m going out to socialise in the evening, given that I don’t drink alcohol and being sociable in some way/interested in conversation is welcome. This is because, like you, I’m not (and dont see the point of) using amphetamine alone for its euphoriant effects.
However, back when I used to be prescribed lower daily doses (It took me years to titrate up to 50mg/day because my psychiatrist isn’t the brightest and has interesting hypothesis', like how amphetamine could potentially be a long-term cardiotoxin [among other things…] in therapeutic doses, despite, y’know, the FDA commissioned studies), I started using supplemental zinc to reduce the minimum effective dose to treat ADHD; it’s shocking how synergistic zinc is with amphetamine for DAT efflux/internalisation. That said, I didn’t just take 50mg, or even 100mg/day. During my peak, I would be taking upwards of 300mg/day of zinc daily. I was taking anywhere from 200mg-300mg everyday for almost 18 months (yes, before you ask, I was supplementing copper). I would even redose more zinc in events where I had vomitted from the associated nausea before a sufficient time had passed for the initial zinc to absorb.
Another important bit of context is that during this period of excessive zinc taking, I would jog/run vigorously for up to 6 hours a day. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m on an immediate release formulation; every dose I took throughout a given day would act as an unconscious set of instructions to begin exercising (i.e., locomotor activating). I would cut social events early so I could go jog, I would insist on travelling to work on foot instead of via public transport because I wanted to exercise on the way there and would consequently show up somewhat late, incredibly sweaty and notably animated in my behaviour due to the transient state of euphoria that I was in. Furthermore, on my days off from work, I would only have the perceived capacity to cease exercise as a result of homeostatic pressures (i.e., peripheral/central fatigue) and despite overtraining injuries, I would take NSAIDs every day for months to help facilitate my ability to engage in physical activity (i.e., without NSAIDs I would just limp everywhere). I guess it’s fair to say that I never took amphetamine on its own as a euphoriant, but I took amphetamine with excessive amounts of zinc and excessive amounts of physical exercise for its euphoriant properties.
I ended up reducing my zinc intake back down to 50-100mg/day a few months after being titrated up to 50mg/day of dexamphetamine, ironically enough because I felt like I was becoming dangerously close to no longer being able to exert inhibitory control over the original cross-sensitising stimulus that you brought up. Coincidentally enough, reducing my zinc intake also reduced and eventually ceased my excessive relationship with exercise; I still exercise every day for the cognitive and affective state benefits, but I can assertively exert inhibitory control for when my social/occupational responsibilities require it. That said, is what I described an addiction in your eyes? Is physical exercise a potential addiction? I know of exercise dependence, but this wasn’t being mediated by negative reinforcement. I can’t find much literature on exercise addiction and maybe that’s because the “despite adverse consequences” clause of an addiction isn’t as prevalent in a hypothetical exercise addiction as it is in, say, meth addiction (again, for obvious reasons). I'm inclined to say that my relationship with physical activity was borderline compulsive, but because I never ended up raising my amphetamine dose (i.e., I still had aversive sensitivity to the consequences of running out of my prescription early), even though taking amphetamine acted as an associated cue to immediately begin exercising, I'm unsure whether or not this is an addiction without escalating intake. FWIW, your table on the FosB#Summary of addiction-related plasticity notes that cross-sensitisation between psychostimulants and physical activity is attenuated.
Also, another thing that I personally find incredibly annoying (and you might share this given that you’ve been dealt the same fate) for assessing these kinds of excessive engagement with behaviours is that I literally have an impulse control disorder and the best medication for it doesn’t cure, but increases my capacity for exerting inhibitory control up to a certain point that then slowly diminishes after the first hour or two of taking an oral formulation. By the end of the day, my ability to exert inhibitory control over a number of different things falls straight into the gutter. This is particularly notable with the original cross-sensitising stimulus, because that behaviour is only engaged in excess (albeit, still not the point of compulsion) when my medication wears off for the day; I’ll always envy people who can get away with taking B.i.D and just chill for the rest of the day. In any event, I guess that we can both share the sentiment that the world would be a better place if you could diagnose an addiction/if ΔFosB has been overexpressed, without having a brain biopsy lol.
I’m sorry to hear about difficulties with the medication shortages. That’s long been a big fear of mine. How are you expected to/did you navigate in that situation? In Australia, the only really notable recent shortage for dexamphetamine was that they didn’t have enough bottles for my entire prescription (i.e., d-amph sulfate is only a generic so bottles are sold as 5mg tablets in quantities of 100; I get 3 bottles/300 tablets to make the month last) and asked that I return a week later for the absent bottle, which didn’t affect my ability to take medication for that week, for obvious reasons. But Vyvanse has a significant shortage over here; all of my friends that have ADHD are prescribed Vyvanse, but I never understood the hype about that formulation. One of them did say something funny in response to the shortage, in that they should “just simply make more” lol. As you’re aware, we don’t have mixed amphetamine salts here in Australia; we just have dexamphetamine and that prodrug that has Frankenstein’s INN. I’ve always wondered, what’s the main clinical difference between MAS and D-amph? I can only think that the duration of action would be slightly longer for MAS, but I’ve noticed that on some monographs the maximum recommended daily doses are 60mg and 40mg respectively. Are MAS prescriptions so much more widespread than D-amph salts prescriptions because there’s some kind of preferable clinical response conferred from taking that amphetamine formulation, relative to pure d-amph salts, or is it purely related to pharmacoeconomic reasons? Again, it’s because I’m Australian.
I also agree that going and reading a study/review/whatever, that someone is making a claim from, is very damning on whether or not somebody has either only read the abstract, or only read a line in a review that makes a broad assertion (i.e., doesn’t restate data from the primary source), without actually looking at the primary sources cited (y’know, the whole point of a literature review is that there is a compilation of literature that one can look through…) to see a detailed version of what’s being assessed; I’ve seen so many cases where people will just assign their own context to what’s being reviewed instead of looking at the primary sources.
Case in point: a few weeks ago, I was speaking to someone online about how methamphetamine is a direct neurotoxin and the person replies “oh, I thought it was only directly toxic at high doses” (...what?) and not in therapeutic doses like those used for ADHD. So, the guy replies with this review and says the following is support for methamphetamine not exerting any kind of direct or indirect neurotoxicity in low doses:
“blood concentrations of 200 mg/ML or higher of meth is when neurotoxicity starts to begin. For reference, 60mg of meth taken orally by an average adult male has a peak blood concentration of 175 mg/ML.”
So, I go and read the primary source that's specifically cited under the overdose section and find that the quoted range was derived from observations of forensic autopsy conducted on the corpses who had suddenly died with methamphetamine present in their system, with the objective of gauging a range that can help guide medical examiners in diagnosing cause of death. Like, WTF? This isn’t even the most absurd part… that title belongs to this being in the fucking abstract “Acute withdrawal lasts typically for 7-10 days, and residual symptoms associated with neurotoxicity may persist for several months.”
I guess that brings me to my final question in this excessive reply; have you noticed that it’s incredibly difficult to find any medical reviews or primary sources in general concerning desoxyn/Rx’d methamphetamine? I would assume this is the case given the weighting given to recreational use on the methamphetamine article; all I can really find in general is the prescriber's monograph. Like, I get that recreational methamphetamine is naturally going to be the dominant perspective in literature given that Rx’d meth vs recreational meth is like ticket sales for the peanut gallery vs the rest of the arena. However, I would’ve expected something to come up given that it’s still an approved and (somewhat) prescribed medication.
Fucking hell, I just read over this again - you thought your essay was bad? Mine's absolutely bonkers; the last paragraph is just me ranting about something trivial. Is this just a caricature of two people on amphetamine having a conversation? Also, I want you to know that I was actively cutting out content whilst writing this to try and avert such a long reply. But, I agree with your sentiment that there’s definitely some thoughts when you’ve experienced something like this, to say the least. In any event, I wish you luck reading all that and hope you can shed some light on the whole zinc, physical activity and amphetamine cross-over, given that you did write the four articles that cover this phenomenon (i.e., amphetamine, addiction, FosB, neurobiological effects of physical exercise).
Lol. This was quite the post. Uhm, yeah I'm familiar with what you're talking about. I used to run marathons. I did like 4 between the ages of 18-22. Loved running. I usually describe a runner's high on an amphetamine as an "ineffable sublime euphoria" because I don't know how to describe it to anyone who hasn't experienced it. I remember I sometimes used to cry while running because I felt so incredibly happy, hahaha. That said, listening to music while running definitely augmented that effect. Edit: I remember writing some stuff about this in a few places, but Reward system#Other species was one of them.
In terms of whether physical exercise is actually addictive, I don't know. I did feel strong urges to exercise as well when I was running upwards of 74 miles/week, and perhaps it can become pathological for some, but I'm not all that familiar with the condition. I imagine the best people to ask would be someone who works in addiction medicine, though case reports would suggest it is a thing. I think behavioral addictions sans drug use are fairly different than behavioral addictions augmented by drug use, however.
In terms of the cross-sensitization effect of psychostimulants and physical exercise, that was more-or-less my experience. If anything, exercise decreases the effective dose of a psychostimulant required to control symptoms. Exercise never gave me the urge to take more amphetamine. But, I agree taking amphetamine does give you the urge to exercise more - or skip your day off and exercise anyway - when you have a very physically active lifestyle.
Zinc is an interesting compound. I'm glad you were taking copper while taking high-dose zinc, haha. High dose zinc increases the excretion of magnesium as well. That said, those doses aren't actually that worrisome since the human body has a number of different autoregulatory mechanisms that facilitate zinc homeostasis (i.e., its GI absorption/excretion, renal excretion, and cellular uptake/efflux) based on current zinc status; I believe MTF1 plays a large role in that. I've never taken more than 100 mg zinc/day on a regular basis so I don't really have any similar experiences to yours. I imagine the effects you experienced from zinc at higher doses were associated with its function as a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, though that's only a guess. I did take slightly over a gram of zinc in a single day - around 5-6 years ago - to assess its effect on something I can't even recall at present. Granted, I remember doing a ton of research on zinc toxicity before doing that. Besides the effect on amphetamine efflux, I've read in medical literature and noticed by supplementing it in high doses that it is remarkably effective against viruses that cause colds and in mitigating the severity of gastrointestinal symptoms associated with diarrhea from any cause.
I think everyone with ADHD has an impulse control disorder to some extent. I suppose "cognitive control disorder" might be more accurate since ADHD does affect other executive functions as well, but it's no real surprise people with ADHD also struggle with issues like addiction. It is a difficult balancing act.
Re: I’m sorry to hear about difficulties with the medication shortages. That’s long been a big fear of mine. How are you expected to/did you navigate in that situation? I switched insurance the month prior, which forced me out of my current network of doctors and pharmacies that generally had Adderall in stock despite the nationwide shortage. There was a delay in refilling my prescription partly because of some BS with my new insurance and partly because I needed needed to obtain an alternative prescription - which ended up being the same dose for instant release dextroamphetamine - before filling it with my new insurance. I'm more-or-less getting a dextroamphetamine prescription every 30 days now.
Re: I’ve always wondered, what’s the main clinical difference between MAS and D-amph? There's not much of one. I used to take dextroamphetamine IR & XR as a kid; I was around 12 when I started using prescription stimulants. I switched to Adderall IR & XR within a few years, then back to IR, which I stayed on for well over a decade, up until this September when I began taking pure dextroamphetamine salts again. I honestly doubt I could tell the difference between Adderall and dextroamphetamine formulations if I received one or the other in a blinded study. Adderall is 75% dextroamphetamine salts, so it's almost the same drug as pure dextroamphetamine salts. I think the prescription of MAS formulations is just more prevalent here due to the extensive marketing Shire PLC conducted during the period they held the patent on Adderall. That being said, I have read that some people do have slightly different clinical responses to MAS relative to pure dextroamphetamine and have read self-reports about differences in affective states and side effects associated with one or the other. I don't think the differences in clinical effects between MAS & dextroamphetamine would be that notable relative to racemic amphetamine (e.g., Evekeo) vs enantiopure dextroamphetamine, though. The clinical efficacy of the drugs might not be all that different, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good to have more options, particularly in light of current drug shortages for various formulations of amphetamine pharmaceuticals. Otherwise, I'd be kind of fucked right now.
That being said, 70 mg of Vyvanse - the max dose prescribed in the United States - actually contains just under half the amount of amphetamine base contained in 60 mg Adderall XR or 60 mg extended release dextroamphetamine (NB: I wasn't the one who added it, but the 2nd table under Amphetamine#Pharmaceutical products is actually very useful for determining comparable base contents to any prescribed dose of most currently available amphetamine pharmaceutical products); so, I probably wouldn't ever use max dose lisdexamfetamine since I know I'd experience a significant drop in treatment efficacy relative to max dose extended release Adderall or dextroamphetamine.
Re: So, I go and read the primary source that's specifically cited under the overdose section and find that the quoted range was derived from observations of forensic autopsy conducted on the corpses who had suddenly died with methamphetamine present in their system, with the objective of gauging a range that can help guide medical examiners in diagnosing cause of death. Like, WTF? This isn’t even the most absurd part… that title belongs to this being in the fucking abstract “Acute withdrawal lasts typically for 7-10 days, and residual symptoms associated with neurotoxicity may persist for several months.” This made me laugh.
Re: I guess that brings me to my final question in this excessive reply; have you noticed that it’s incredibly difficult to find any medical reviews or primary sources in general concerning desoxyn/Rx’d methamphetamine? Yes, but that's not really surprising. If there were more clinical use of methamphetamine for treating ADHD and the like, there would likely be more interest from researchers to study and write about it. Since amphetamine and methylphenidate are alternatives with comparable efficacy and presumably greater safety, that's what ends up getting prescribed and studied instead.
Thanks again for taking the time to address this all, Seppi. You absolutely covered it all.
After reading your input Re: excessive exercise and evaluating it again, I'm now more inclined to say that my experience was probably not a behavioural addiction; I think that taking such excessive amounts of zinc, with my normal dose of amphetamine, likely resulted in me overshooting the threshold for an optimal dose to treat ADHD. Such a scenario is consistent with experiencing impaired cognitive control (i.e., choosing to act out on the urge to 'move'/exercise to effectively procrastinate more immediately important tasks) and amplified locomotor activity, especially within the first hour or so of taking an oral dose (when dopaminergic signaling is at its highest), as opposed to experiencing the intended ADHD treatment effect of decreased locomotor activity. Your earlier inclusion of Yerkes-Dodson law played a considerably part in me arriving to this conclusion too. Like you, I also don't really experience anxiety on stimulants. I did, however, feel incredibly restless shortly after taking an oral formulation with such high doses of zinc. Consequently, I found it incredibly difficult to get much done in an efficient manner. So, deferring to running during those time periods was likely a coping mechanism for just that. After all, my preference to move/exercise no longer interfered with my ability to prioritise tasks almost immediately upon reducing zinc intake by ~200mg/day.
That said, I'm not surprised that case reports seem to believe that exercise addiction is a thing. Albeit some of the ones I've read are annoyingly disjointed between the evidence-based model of addiction and the we'll-do-whatever-the-hell-we-wanna-do model that diagnostic manuals, like the DSM, use; e.g., one of the case reports I read for 'exercise addiction' included withdrawal as a proposed symptom...
In any event, I'm sure excessive exercise can arise for a number of reasons that isn't necessarily a result of DeltaFosB overexpression. It could be OCD-related, it could be eating-disorder related (i.e., prolonged aerobic exercise to persistently expend calories), it could be someone effluxing too much DA via their ADHD treatment... etc.
Re:I usually describe a runner's high on an amphetamine as an "ineffable sublime euphoria" because I don't know how to describe it to anyone who hasn't experienced it. I remember I sometimes used to cry while running because I felt so incredibly happy, hahaha. That said, listening to music while running definitely augmented that effect.
I couldn't possibly agree more. The feeling is larger than life and there is a considerable amount of salience and appreciation attached to even the most trivial details. I'd go as far to say that (whilst being somewhat tongue-in-cheek) if there's any compensation for having a lifelong brain disease, then I guess that being able to induce euphoria, virtually every day, via distance running on a psychostimulant is a pretty good tradeoff.
Re:: I did feel strong urges to exercise as well when I was running upwards of 74 miles/week
If I may ask, what did your running schedule look like during this period of time? E.g., how many days a week were you splitting that distance over and were you running with the objective of covering distance as quickly as possible, or did you instead prioritise moderate exertion? I ask because I'm hoping to train and successfully run my first marathon in a number of months. It would be good to get advice from you on how to make it sustainable, given that running on amphetamine is markedly different to running without it. Did you get more mileage out of running when taking amphetamine at a certain time before/during a run? Did the anorectic effects of amphetamine ever interfere with your ability to sufficiently replenish your glycogen stores when running 74 miles/week Nowadays I typically run 2 (3 on a good week) half-marathons/week. But I won't run more than ~40 miles/week. I feel like my biggest challenge atm is trying to pace myself (i.e., I'll borderline sprint if I've taken dextroamphetamine in the last hour and end up with 3:45km splits, but consequently the rest of my run will suffer, and I'll feel sore). IMO 74 miles is incredible, and I'd love to train myself to run something comparable.
Thanks again. All the best for the holiday season, Seppi; hope you get some time off to enjoy some leisure and take it easy.
@Quimble22:I'd go as far to say that (whilst being somewhat tongue-in-cheek) if there's any compensation for having a lifelong brain disease, then I guess that being able to induce euphoria, virtually every day, via distance running on a psychostimulant is a pretty good tradeoff. Agreed.
If I may ask, what did your running schedule look like during this period of time? My weekly running schedule at peak mileage was basically just a constant repeat of the routine below; I maintained that schedule for a few months just before running my 2nd marathon, which also happened to be my fastest (just for context, here are my race times - I developed plica syndrome after my 2nd marathon and had to get arthroscopic knee surgery to correct it before I was able to run long distances again, hence the 4-year gap between my 2nd/3rd marathons). Generally, I'd try to go as fast as I could, but when you're running long distances fast, you're basically limited to going as fast as your lactate threshold allows (i.e., the point at which you feel a burning sensation in your muscles from intense exertion; it's basically the point at which your muscles transition from aerobic metabolism/exercise to anaerobic metabolism/exercise). Exceeding that will force you to slow down to recover at some point, and alternating your pace to run fast - exceeding your lactate threshold - and then slow down to recover (NB: this is a type of interval training called fartlek, which is a good way to increase your lactate threshold) will ultimately yield a slower average pace than running at a pace just below your lactate threshold. So basically, to run your best time and/or get the most benefit from a long-distance training run, you want to run as fast as you can without transitioning into anaerobic respiration during the run. Doing fartleks or other forms of interval training on your shorter runs will also benefit your endurance, but I never really liked doing that form of training since I don't enjoy sprinting or just exceeding my lactate threshold while running in general.
Monday - 16 miles
Tuesday - 8 miles
Wednesday - 16 miles
Thursday - 8 miles
Friday - 4 miles
Saturday - 22 miles
Sunday - 0 miles (rest day)
With all that said, I always took immediate-release amphetamine immediately before a run because its onset of action is pretty fast and its duration of action for reducing central nervous system fatigue (which you experience as a reduction in perceived exertion at any fixed level of exercise intensity) is about 3-4 hours; it's essentially the same duration of action that amphetamine has for controlling ADHD symptoms. The physical performance-enhancing effects (i.e., those described in Amphetamine#Physical performance) are almost entirely mediated by increased dopamine neurotransmission in the CNS, so the improvements in physical performance you'll experience will increase and gradually decrease over the same time course as the improvements you experience in cognitive performance from taking it. In other words, you'll probably experience the peak endurance benefit in the first hour and a gradual reduction back to your baseline level of endurance over the following 2-3 hours. It is worth mentioning that amphetamine does allow your maximum body temperature to increase a little higher than it would without taking it, so it's probably best not to push yourself too much - and ensure you remain hydrated - when using amphetamine while exercising in hot weather.
Did the anorectic effects of amphetamine ever interfere with your ability to sufficiently replenish your glycogen stores when running 74 miles/week Not really. I actually opted to do 3 long-distance training runs every week - as opposed to a running schedule more like 12/12/12/12/4/22 - simply because I always enjoyed stuffing my face with tons of food after finishing long training runs. lol. Seriously though, my main concern was with not eating too much due to the fact that weight gain decreases running performance, although I suppose the anorectic effects of stimulants vary from person to person.
Nowadays I typically run 2 (3 on a good week) half-marathons/week. But I won't run more than ~40 miles/week. That's not bad; I was running that mileage for a while. I gradually increased my weekly mileage from 40-ish to 74 over the course of about a year. I wouldn't recommend increasing your mileage by more than 5-10% per week if/when you make an effort to increase your training volume, though. I also wouldn't recommend increasing your weekly mileage every week, since you'll reduce your risk of developing an overuse injury if you give your body time to adapt to the increased training volume before increasing it again. The risk of developing an overuse injury markedly increases when your weekly mileage increases by more than 10%/week since it puts a lot of strain on your muscles and joints. It's important to not push yourself too hard - and pay attention to any unusual strain you feel in your muscles/joints - when you increase your training volume because the risk of developing an overuse injury still increases somewhat even when your weekly mileage increases by only 5-10%. I developed several overuse injuries before I finally learned to increase my mileage gradually in relatively small increments as I've described. Hehe.
Lastly – and I feel like this is a shameless plug since I wrote most of this article, but – I'd strongly recommend taking hydroxymethylbutyrate about an hour before starting a long-distance training run. You'll incur less skeletal muscle damage (which you'll perceive as a reduction in delayed onset muscle soreness) and recover faster afterward when taking 3-gram doses of it before and after your longer training runs. Its main benefit for endurance running is the mitigation of skeletal muscle catabolism/proteolysis, which in turn reduces markers of skeletal muscle damage after intense or protracted exercise (edit: after rereading what I wrote in the article, the reduction in post-exercise skeletal muscle damage biomarkers is actually hypothesized to be due to a cholesterol-mediated effect on the muscle cell membrane; also, the effect size of this reduction is pretty large as described here: Β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid#cite note-biomarkers-42). It apparently also increases aerobic exercise performance, but I don't think the effect size is particularly large/notable compared to the extent it reduces muscle damage from exercise, which for me was fairly noticeable. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 07:48, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
New Page Review article queue, March to September 2023
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In December 2018 you added a tag to the Pharmacodynamics subsection of Vitamin C and posted related content on the Talk page of the article (since archived in Archive 3). The article tag is still there from 2018. I recently nominated vitamin C to be a Featured article and it was kicked back for having unresolved content issues, including this one. What would you recommend be added/revised to that subsection, so that the tag can be removed? David notMD (talk) 10:09, 21 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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It has been a minute since we spoke. I hope life is treating you well. There's no urgency for getting back to me on this one.
What motivated your interest in taking up statistics/mathematics? I'm quite interested in getting more familiarised with maths and possibly taking up more units beyond the intro to stats class that I'm doing next semester. Do you have any good pointers and/or reference texts for this? I'm also interested in learning analytic proofs and how to write mathematical proofs (nb: I have NO background in Algebra because I did not pay much attention in high school, so I don't anticipate this being straight forward) if you have any pointers for that to. I tried surfing relevant wiki articles, but, it's kinda hard to wrap my head around (presumably) because I still have a learning curve to climb. That said, one of your citations on Wikipedia introduced me to Nestler et al's neuropharmacology textbook, which helped develop my love for that particular branch of health science, so, I figure you might have something similar for mathematics/stats. In any event, I probably don't edit wiki as much because, as a fairly new undergraduate, I'm not that confident in drawing inferences when synthesising research for potential citations.
Also, I have a specific question that's related. What role does preclinical/animal research actually serve? I know that animal research on, for example, neurotoxicity is a non-probability sample for humans due to interspecies variations in physiology. Which, yes, is underpinned by the famous example of amphetamine exerting (indirect?) neurotoxicity in non-human primates, yet inducing functional improvements and structural neuroplasticity in humans (with pathophysiology that gives rise to ADHD symptoms, at the very least) who take low doses (i.e., ~60mg). Even if animal research can't be generalised to humans, does it play some kind of role in determining how a study involving humans should be conducted (e.g., what weight-based doses to give) or if a study should even go ahead at all? A lot of avenues where I try to find an answer more-or-less imply that animal research has some translatability to humans, despite being a nonprobability sample. I tried asking one of the neuropsychology convenors at my university, but he said it would be best that I find a biostatistician to speak to. So, here I am lol
PS: I really appreciate your previous HMB recommendation; it certainly did the trick and I've been increasing my mileage steadily (i.e., I now do an individual 30km run each fortnight) with no IT band pain!
Quimble22 (talk) 13:15, 14 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Quimble22: Glad you found HMB helpful. I don't normally recommend supplements, but that's one of the few exceptions.
When I was in college, I was interested in proprietary algorithmic/systematic trading, so I ended up majoring and graduating with degrees in math, finance, and economics. I sort of lost interest in pursuing a career in finance in the interim. I don't have any good suggestions for an intro to stats textbook, but I learned the basics of mathematical/analytical proofs from this textbook - https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Proofs-Transition-Advanced-Mathematics/dp/0321390539 - which I think did a really good job at explaining and illustrating the various methods of proving assertions (i.e., types of mathematical proofs, like proof by contradiction, proof by counterexample, etc.). I thought that class would be boring and difficult, but it actually was actually interesting and relatively easy if only because of that textbook. Honestly, I thought it was easier to learn the basics of mathematical proofs than it was to learn the basics of statistics, though that might have been because my stats professor wasn't that good, our textbook sucked, and the course itself was a requirement for admission into the business school at my undergrad university (i.e., it was more focused on statistical application than providing an understanding of mathematical statistics and the underlying theory).
The main benefit of preclinical research is that it generates results that inform future research in humans; it also costs significantly less to do preclinical research relative to clinical studies due to all the requirements involved with performing research with human subjects. Obviously, preclinical research results don't necessarily apply to humans or in a clinical setting, if only due to the fact that humans and non-human animals have considerably different genomes, which is one of the main factors that can cause or contribute to variable outcomes across species. Consequently, follow-up research - either a clinical study or corroborating evidence from another type of study in humans - is pretty much always necessary to verify the relevance/applicability of preclinical animal research findings in humans. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 20:32, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also, for what it's worth, you'll end up proving basically all the math you were taught from elementary school to precalculus in an intro to mathematical proofs course. It's much more understandable when you actually prove it than when you learn how to apply it IMO. Courses in real analysis involve calculus proofs at the undergrad level; graduate real analysis involves proofs with measure theory and forms of integration you probably never have heard of (as was the case for me), like lebesgue integration. I think graduate pure math courses are generally too theoretical and abstract to be useful in real-world applications - and they're generally hard as fuck - so I didn't really enjoy any of the graduate pure math courses I took. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 20:41, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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August 24: Not just an edit-a-thon, an edit-a-thon in Manhattan Beach.
Please join WikiLA at an edit-a-thon to improve and create articles related to marine life and the ocean in the Los Angeles area. Inspiration courtesy of the public library in Manhattan Beach, one of SoCal's most beautiful coastal communities.
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An automated process has detected that when you recently edited List of human protein-coding genes 3, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page SCTR.
The reason I ask is because all of the content for that subsection is already sitting comfortably in the amphetamine article source code, if only because it allows the lisdexamfetamine#medical subsections to render both (1) alphabetically and (2) in order of its on-label vs off-label use (i.e., narcolepsy renders after ADHD & BED).
IMO the content is analogous in quality to the narcolepsy section I wrote and the ADHD section you wrote (NB: it was virtually 1 billion% [that's billion with a b] easier to cite/write the BED section than the narcolepsy one); however, I didn't render it to the amphetamine parent article because all the citations I gathered only cover its use in LDX. As a result, I repeatedly refer to "Lisdexamfetamine [rest of syntax]..." throughout the BED section (sans when writing about its therapeutic MOA and I'm sure you understand why), which might confuse readers, since the other two subsections (ADHD & Narcolepsy) discuss the medical qualities as "amphetamine this" and "amphetamine that," etc. If you do think its worthwhile to render the BED content to the amph article, should I:
Revise the section so that its therapeutic MOA in the second paragraph refers to amphetamine rather than dextroamphetamine?
Leave the content as is and just render it to the parent article and selectively transclude to the LDX article (so it doesn't render to, say, Adderall#Medical).
Do nothing (i.e., leave it rendered only on the LDX article per the sources).
I think it's fine just to transclude it into the amphetamine article if you want to do that, though the lead probably needs to be edited to mention that indication for ldx. It's probably worthwhile for readers to add it IMO. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 19:43, 12 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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Been a while since I got one of those! Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 17:33, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
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Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 02:13, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
Done @Heartmusic678: HMB biosynthesis and metabolism diagram.png - FlightTime (open channel) 17:22, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
Template:Annotated image 4/Annotation has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Q28 (talk) 02:23, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
Barnstars will be awarded.
The redirect Β-Endorphins has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 June 2 § Β-Endorphins until a consensus is reached. Mdewman6 (talk) 21:59, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
The Return of the LA Wiknic
