Quote:
Originally Posted by Hopeful
Lisa V., I am curious what your husband's trough levels are with his low dosage. It would be nice to be on a lower dosage some day!
|
They don't test his CSA levels that often, Hopeful. Since he's been pretty stable (and since we have lousy insurance and have to pay extra for each additional test), it seems more important to just keep an eye on his creatinine, but every so often they'll run a CSA test just to see where he's at. Since being on 175 mg/day, his trough level readings have ranged from 49 to 83 (average 65). The only two valid trough readings when he was on 200 mg/day were 114 and 145 (he accidentally got one just a few hours after taking his meds, since he didn't know they were going to do a CSA that day, and that was 188). So it seems that just a 25 mg reduction in dose actually cut his blood level in half.
We were kind of alarmed to find out that they weren't testing his blood levels at all in the beginning. It was only after I read some postings about it (on Aplastic Central) and started asking questions that we got the test. By that time, he had already reduced his dosage from 900 mg/day to 500 and been on that for a month, and he still came back with a trough reading of 885! Can you imagine what it must have been at 900 mg? No wonder he felt like death warmed over! As soon as we got that reading they told him to reduce it to 200 mg. Really, I hate to think what might have happened if I had not been comparing notes with other patients, but I'm sure glad I did!