Sympatheticolytic

Other pharmacologic actions include the cyanosis of the coxcomb, rather slight sympatheticolytic (epinephrine-reversal) action, slight rise in blood pressure, depression of frog’s heart, mydriasis in rabbits (M. E. Davis, Adair, Chen and Swanson, 1935).

Our own observations—particularly in those experiments in which marked variations of the electrocardiogram during the hot-air bath were reduced or disappeared after application of a sympatheticolytic drug—often showed typical sympatheticotonic variations during the pyrexia and vagotonic variations after its completion (Fig. 2).

At this time, the rationale for the use of ergotamine was that, contrary to the interpretation that had prevailed in earlier years, migraine headache depended on excessive rather than decreased sympathetic activity, and that ergotamine had a sympatheticolytic rather than a sympathomimetic effect.

Cocaine diminished considerably the hypertensive effect, which is not reversed by the sympatheticolytic F. 883.

Combined therapy is recommended—“priscol” (benzyl-imidazoline) a sympatheticolytic, 20 mg. daily, and “dilvaséne”, a synthetic parasympatheticomimetic, 50 mg. daily, both by mouth, in three or four divided doses.

Drugs used were hydergine, a sympatheticolytic and vasodilator combination of dihydroergocornine, dihydroergocristine and dihydroergokryptine, and bellergal, a combination of a parasympatheticolytic bellafoline, a sympatheticolytic ergotamine tartrate and a sedative phenobarbitone.

Experiments with the administration of 0.75 mg. ergotamine subcutaneously did not confirm the assumed importance of sympatheticolytics in the inhibition of mucus secretion.

Flemming (1954) found, after instillation of drugs into the conjunctival sac, that sympathetico-memetics and parasympatheticolytics increase the flicker frequency, while parasympathetico-memetics and sympatheticolytics reduce it. (Alpern and Jampel, 1959).

In this therapy every pharmacodynamic agent acts predominantly at the level of the pathogenic link affected: the sympatheticolytics at the level of vasoconstriction, the adrenocortical mixture at the level of vasodilatation.