Leflunomide 101: Dosing, Side Effects and More (Plus Why It's Not Your Doctor's First Choice) скачать в хорошем качестве

Leflunomide 101: Dosing, Side Effects and More (Plus Why It's Not Your Doctor's First Choice)

Leflunomide is a drug that's used to treat arthritis in adults and kids. But it's usually not the first line therapy. Your doctor will usually start with Methotrexate. If that doesn't work or you don't have good results than leflunomide is generally one of the next therapies they will try. Dosage Sometimes your doctor will start out by giving what's called a loading dose of leflunomide. What that means is that you'll receive a higher dose the first 3 days. Usually 100 mg per day for 3 days. Then your doctor will level you off to what's called a maintenance dose. Usually 10 to 20 mg a day depending on your situation. I'm actually not a fan of the loading dose. I don't think it's that beneficial and it tends to cause more side effects which we will get into next. Side Effects Diarrhea - This can occur and anywhere from 15 almost 30% of patients. This is one of the reasons why I personally don't like seeing the loading dose used because the incidence of diarrhea goes up to the high-end of this range. Alopecia - this is another term used to describe baldness or patches of baldness. It can happen in anywhere from 10 to 15% of patients sometimes a little higher. Obviously nobody wants to get this side effect that this can be particularly problematic for women. Usually when Leflunomdie is stopped hair loss usually stops and grows back. Headache - headaches can occur in 7% to 13% of patients who use leflunomide. It tends to not be the kind of side effect that makes people have to stop the drug but it can be bothersome. Keep in mind that when it comes to side effects they sometimes go away the longer you use a drug. So when a side effect does pop-up try to give the drug enough of the chance to see if the side effects will go away with a few weeks of use (as long as the side effect isn’t debilitating). If a side effect is really bad don’t try to gut it out. Just talk to your doctor about switching to something else. Monitoring One of the things with leflunomide is that they're going to have to do some pretty regular monitoring of your labs. This is actually pretty common in all of these oral drugs that are used to treat arthritis. In particular they're going to monitor your liver labs monthly for the first 6 months. If everything is good at that point they'll probably monitor every 6 to 8 weeks after that. Contraindications. There are a couple of groups of people that you can't use leflunomide in. Pregnancy - You can't use leflunomide in pregnancy. So any woman who could become pregnant can't use leflunomide. Liver Disease - Leflunomide would also be a poor choice in anybody with any sort of liver disease. Drug Interactions I don't want to go into the specific drug interactions because there can be a lot of them just like any other drug. Instead I'll just give general reasons and drug classes that you want to be careful with. The first one is to be careful giving the leflunomide with any other drugs that can cause a liver issues. The other class of drugs that you want to be careful with is anything that can lower the immune system.