Kavalactones do what, exactly?

[Steve Mariotti]

I thought I'd start a thread to try to coax out what the effects are of the various Big Six kavalactones that constitute a kava's chemotype.

1 - DMY - No idea.
2 - DHK - Sedating.
3 - Yangonin - Uplifting?
4 - Kavain - Euphoric
5 - DHM - Very sedating?
6 - Methysticin - No clue.

Having never had any one of these in pure form for comparison, I've been trying to suss out through comparative analysis what constitutes what. My own personal observations suggest that DHK may be responsible for or catalyzing for the eye-laggy head-swimmy effect. Kavain seems to be the pink cheeks/tingly scalp effect. DHM for the body looseness and barely-attached-limbs feeling. Though that may be DHK as well.

/shrug

Anyone have any better data?

 

[muzzled dogg]

http://www.kavaforums.com/forum/wiki/kava-chemotypes/
http://www.kavalibrary.com/Chemotypes.html

 

[verticity]

Yes, it's kind of hard to say based only on personal experience. It's basically like trying to map a correlation between your personal experience/feelings and an abstract vector in six dimensional hyperspace.

Some interesting data, though, are:

• @Judd Rench once said he knew a guy who isolated pure kavain, and said the experience was "like meth" -- So stimulating, euphoric.
• Wikipedia says Yangonin acts at cannabinoid receptors, and therefore might have a stimulating or anxiety-provoking effect.
  
• Mo'i is very high in yangonin, and @Deleted User noticed that when he used too much of it he experienced unpleasant anxiety symptoms.
• The effects of tudei kavas are well known, and are strongly correlated with DHM content.
• I would add that methysticin is also correlated with tudei-ness, so that may have similar effects to DHM, or the correlation may be for some other reason
  
• DHK is generally believed to be sedating/tudei-ish, but it is actually not correlated with tudei-ness. It seems to have some euphoric effects but also sedating effects that are not as unpleasant as DHM

DMY? Not a friggin clue

 

[Butch]

How have kavalactones been researched in the past?

 

[Steve Mariotti]

As the effects of kavalactones are thought to be interdependent, sampling them individually might not tell us much about their effects. The balance between them seems to be the best indicator, but we do need a lot more research on this topic!

I'm up to the challenge.

 

[Butch]

Isolated Kavalactones... We might not hear from Steve again in awhile

 

[Steve Mariotti]

The extracts loaded into dispensers for your very own "dial-a-kava" machine. Except for the hundreds of other organic compounds which interact with everything and make kava what it truly is.