I’ve started to take lortadine (generic Claretin), for allergy symptoms. The directions say to take one every 24 hours. However, they only seem to work for about 4-6 hours. I’m wondering about the drawbacks or dangers of taking it more often. Clearly, I’m not seeking medical advice, but rather an understanding of the nature of that particular type of drug and its actions in the body. Any help, Dopers? Is Qadgop still around these here parts?
xo, CC
I am not Qad but hope you don’t stop reading right now.
Few drugs are as safe as loratadine. Taking more is probably not going to hurt you. I would be surprised, though, if it helped.
(Are you taking any other meds, btw? Maybe one of them is revving up your metabolism of the loratadine?)
As someone who has suffered all his life from chronic perennial rhinitis (stuffy nose and sneezing all the time), if someone could have overdosed on antihistamines, it would have been me. I routinely went back to the bottle for more. It made me sleepy (esp. benedryl) but since my time of greatest need was at night, that was not a problem.
For me, Claritin has always been ineffectual. This may be a purely personal reaction, but I know other people for whom it is true. It is my understanding (perhaps wrong) that in order to claim that this drug did not make you drowsy, it was tested (and prescribed) at lower doses. I suspect that taking more doses will not hurt you, but might make you drowsy. Be careful about driving until you get a handle on how it affects you.
I am also suspicious of long acting dosages. Generally these are constructed in a fashion that protects some of the dosage from being absorbed by you body immediately. Those formulations never worked for me. You might be better off using the regular dosages more often.
Finally, the class of drugs that made the most difference in my life are those drugs that deliver a topically applied steroid to the inside of the nasal passages. First it was Beconase, now I use Flonase. They do not deliver immediate relief, but using them regularly when needed relieves most of my symptoms. If you have not tried them, talk to your doctor about them.
IANAD.
I have taken 3 lortadine a day sporadically depending upon the weather for several years. I do not find the one a day effective. I don’t know if there are any side affects I don’t know about.
Claritin does not work at all for me–only Sudafed. And I cannot take it more than the recommended dosage, or my heart races.
Take Allegra. Much more effective.
Add me to the list of chronic sinus stuffiness, for years. However, not any more! My sinuses have not been this clear for years, longer than I can remember. What did I do? Neti pot.
I had known about them for a long time but was too skittish to try it. Finally, after pounding sinus headaches I bought one and just did the cleanse with amazing results. So… possibly my post here might help someone. It is called Neilmed, $15 bucks at CVS.
Naturally, it’s possible to overdose on pretty much anything, but you’d have to make a bit of an effort to do so successfully with loratadine; the LD50 (approximately half of a lethal dose) seems to range from about 500mg/kg to a few thousand mg/kg, depending on the study.
If you have existing liver problems, however, then your risks go up simply because it is the liver that metabolizes loratadine. Be careful with it in that case, but that’s good advice for any drug if you have liver problems!
Pseudoephedrine can raise your blood pressure. It’s not something you want to overdose on if you have tendencies toward high blood pressure. Claritin-D has pseudoephedrine, regular Claritin does not.
I don’t agree with this way of describing an LD50, as it implies that you would need to take twice as much to run any serious risk of dying.
If I had to boil it down to approximately the same length of phrase, I’d define LD50 as “dose that’s lethal half the time.”
I am not KarlGauss (who knows more about internal medicine than I ever will) but I echo his comments.
Antihistamines generally reduce itching, sneezing, and runny nose. Non-sedating ones such as zyrtec or claritin are considered firstline, but many folks don’t get enough relief from them. It’s hard to take too much of them unless you really try, but higher doses don’t help much more either. So don’t take them.
The sedating antihistamines may work better, but they are, you know, sedating. Folks who try to drive or solve problems on these medications chronically show a definite falloff in performance and skill level.
Neti pots can help. Use distilled water if you’re worried about things eating your brain.
Frankly, I’m more of a fan of the steroid nasal sprays to reduce these symptoms.
I agree with you - it was terrible phrasing on my part. Thank you for pointing it out - your definition is much more appropriate.
OK. I have some diphenhydramine tablets, bought at Rite-Aid. They are packaged as sleep aids, but diphenhydramine is actually the antihistamine widely sold as Benydryl, for treatment of allergy symptoms and runny nose. Obviously, it is a sedating antihistamine. (I actually find these things quite effective when I cannot sleep and have a runny nose.)
Each of these tablets has 25mg of diphenhydramine, according to the box, and the recommended dosage is 2 tablets. What prompts me to post in this thread, however, is the warning on the box:
I took this to mean that the recommended 50mg is very close to a dangerous dose, and you should not risk even a tiny bit more. After all, the amount of the drug you can absorb into the bloodstream from a topical ointment (I do, actually, occasionally use a diphenhydramine cream for skin itches) surely cannot be very much compared to the 50mg in two of these fairly large tablets, which are saturated enough with the stuff as to make my tongue slightly numb if I do not swallow them down quickly enough. (If only the ointment were that effective on my itches!) Surely the point, here, cannot be that too much of the stuff will make you drowsy. That is the whole point of these things, and a tiny bit more drowsiness is not going to be bad.
So, what is the deal here? Why is it a bad thing to use diphenhydramine ointment together with these sleep tablets (or is it, really)? Could I really OD on two of these tablets and a bit of ointment?
No, that’s just CYA language for an OTC product.
I get worried if I see patients exceeding 400 mg a day.
OK. I will take your word for it. The fact is I sometimes do get annoying itches at night, and sometimes might truly be tempted to use the ointment together with these pills (though I am guessing that the pills might fix the itch by themselves, given a bit of time to work).
It seems odd, though, that they specifically warn you against the “products used on the skin,” which surely cannot be delivering a very high dose to the body as a whole (as opposed to the spot where you apply it).
Careful with more than 3 Benadryl in a night. I find that If I take more, my skin STARTS to itch. It gets really annoying and makes it impossible to sleep, because right when you’re finished scratching one part and get comfy again, another part of the body will start to itch. And since I’m using it to sleep anyway, I usually give up at that point.
Not for all of us. It works as well as zyrtec or claritin for me, which is juuuust effective enough for me to not get a sinus infection when my sinuses swell and trap gunk in there (or so my doctor in college claimed) like I do when I take nothing. My nose is still stuffy and my eyes still bother me taking any of the three. Adding sudafed helps a little but nothing ever clears my stuffy nose completely, not even using Neilmed bottle. Frankly, I rarely bother with the Neilmed bottle because it makes me throw up 1/3 of the time and offers minimial reduction of stuffiness for all of half an hour or so.
I doubt it.
Before I got allergy shots as a young teen I used to routinely take 100 mg of Benadryl at a time. And during the height of allergy season I did it often enough that it was no longer knocking me out.
Actually, the high level of antihistamines I was taking was one of the factors in dragging me off to the allergist for shots. I am happy to same the shots worked and I haven’t had to take antihistamines in that quantity for nearly 40 years. Yay.
But yeah, going past 50mg for someone not accustomed to high doses probably isn’t going to be of much benefit from a “put you to sleep” viewpoint. Heck, most people seem to get drowsy enough to fall asleep even at 25 mg.
It’s more a CYA statement than anything else.
(Note: If the docs show up and say I was doing something incredibly foolish and dangerous take their word over mine.)
As an ME I occasionally see fatal antihistamine ODs, but they are always intentional, as you do have to take a such a large amount. That’s in contrast to acetaminophen, about once a month or so I see someone die of liver failure from an accidental OD.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while. We appear to have a couple of doctors knowledgeable about the issue here. Is there any danger in staggering Claritin, Zyrtec, and Allegra, the way staggering otc pain medications is sometimes recommended? I’ve found conflicting information on the safety, without any clarification beyond an increased risk of drowsiness. Most of the sites I saw said doubling up would be ineffective, but didn’t really address staggering. Would there even be any benefit?