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Re: Lamictal question

Posted by blueboy on July 16, 2008, at 10:21:02

In reply to Re: Lamictal question, posted by NewHampshireGuy on July 15, 2008, at 12:28:42

You didn't say how long you've been at 100mg/day, or what you did to work up to that level.

IMUI (in my uninformed opinion, hehe) Lamictal is one of the most titration sensitive drugs. Like you, I'm taking it for a spin for the first time.

It definitely takes some time to adjust to each increase in level, and it seems to pay big dividends by taking the increases fairly slowly.

The best I can tell, each time I've increased my dosage, I've gotten increased insomnia for a few days. Being bipolar, though, it's hard to tell, since my insomnia varies a lot through different cycles. Also, stress will trigger it even though I don't realize that I'm getting stressed.

I can also say, yesterday I had the best day I've had in a long time. I'm at 125mg/day and have been for a week. I'm going to 150 tomorrow.

Since you are bipolar, you are going to have difficulty determining whether some problems are side effects or caused by other factors (such as bipolar cycles or environmental factors).

Again take insomnia as an example. I get wired for periods of time when I'm not on any drugs. Like, one night about two months ago, for no discernible reason, I didn't even go to bed until 5:00 am. This also had a possible OCD contribution, as I was extremely obssessed with watching tv.

This got me on a cycle for weeks where I couldn't go to bed or get to sleep. (It's fairly important for me to get to bed early, for a lot of reasons. Let me know if you want an essay, LOL.)

If I had just started taking Lamictal, I would have been tempted to give up on it because it "caused terrible insomnia". Whereas, the fact is, the insomnia would have had nothing to do with Lamictal.

So my points are:

1) If you are BP (or even if you aren't), be really skeptical about whether or not a problem that occurs after you start taking a drug is a side effect, if the side effect is something you have had, a variation of something you have had, or even something you could have (like stomach acid or ringing ears) if you weren't taking a drug.

2) With Lamictal, give it some time. This is a drug that in a lot of cases has practically no side effects at all. Plus, there are many reports of initial side effects that disappear with time (although I suspect that some of these reports were not side effects in the first place, since Lamictal is so often prescribed for BP disorders).

Here's another example. Two days after my first dose of Lamictal, at 25mg/day, I developed a fairly bad rash that didn't look like any rash I had ever had. I totally freaked out. I got my dermatologist to see me that same day, and she said: "This rash is definitely not a reaction to a drug. And it doesn't even remotely resemble Stevens-Johnson."

She did a biopsy, even though she didn't need to. The lab confirmed her diagnosis -- some sort of external dermatitis, probably caused by a contact allergy.


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