# Social anxiety due to excess glutamate ?



## robertz (Feb 4, 2009)

I've heard this hypothesis more than once in this forum, so I decided to experiment a bit with myself. This morning I took 1gram of L-Glutamine which is a precursor for glutamate. In 1 hour I was feeling nervous, and was having major concentration problems. I definately think we have some kind of problem with glutamate metabolism, because normal people might even feel calm after taking glutamine because it is also the precursor to GABA.


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## crayzyMed (Nov 2, 2006)

Yeah, its been shown that ppl with social anxiety have higher levels of glutamate in the brain, therefor i'm a big proponent of memantine.


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## robertz (Feb 4, 2009)

Sure, but Memantine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memantine) has side effects, I would like a more natural approach. Are you taking it ? Is it doing any good ?

Would high doses of magnesium work in a similar way ?


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## crayzyMed (Nov 2, 2006)

robertz said:


> Sure, but Memantine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memantine) has side effects, I would like a more natural approach. Are you taking it ? Is it doing any good ?
> 
> Would high doses of magnesium work in a similar way ?


I'm completely side effect free on memantine, it only causes some brainfog at the start of the treatment wich wears off soon.

It helps me alot with OCD, still on a too low dose to benefit SA.

It would be the perfect drug for SA imo, as we have lower D2 binding wich NMDA antagonists upregulate, and its also a D2 agonist wich helps us even more with the NMDA antagonism.
There's more info in my memantine thread.

Magnesium could help, but its probably to weak.


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