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L-tryptophan and depressive illness: a valuable adjunct to therapy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Donald Eccleston
Donald Eccleston*
Affiliation:
Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 4LP
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L-tryptophan is an essential amino acid in human nutrition. The minimum daily requirement for adults is in the range of 175 to 250 mg daily and this is normally exceeded in the average western diet which contains 600 to 1000 mg. Excess tryptophan is normally metabolised through the kynurenine pathway and only 1–2% of tryptophan in the diet is converted to 5-HT. The concept that 5-HT had a part to play in depressive illness evolved after the original observation by Ashcroft & Sharman in 1960 that patients with severe depressive illness had lower levels of the metabolite of 5-HT in cerebrospinal fluid compared with controls. In addition, early papers on the therapeutic efficacy of tryptophan suggested that it was potentially as successful as ECT.

Information

Type
Expert opinion
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , April 1993, pp. 223 - 224
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 1993

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