Tapering of steroids after being given them for a crohns flare.

Hello everyone ,
Having been on here several times in the past and finding some good advice I thought
I would come and ask your opinions on an issue I am having at the moment with coming
of a dose of steroids.

I was admitted to hospital at the start of the year as I was having a flare up and within
a few days they did the normal thing they do of putting me on a short course of steroids
to my crohns under control again. I was started on 40mg initally but after a short period
of time they dropped that to 30mg. Since then I have been reducing by 5mg every five days.

I first had some problems when I got down to 20mg, I had problems concentrating
and remembering what I was doing and it seemed to be very hard to think. I also
felt quite tired and had the most awful headaches. However after a few days this went
away and I started to feel a lot better, my thinking returned to normal and I felt
quite happy.

However the last few days on 10mg and now today down to 5mg I have been feeling
very tired and headachey and I seem to be having slow thinking again.

I was just wondering what you had found with tapering down steroids to nothing,
have you found that reducing down from 5mg to 0 over 5 days/ a week or a month is
best without serious side effects or is it best to take it slowly and reduce by
1mg over 5 days/ a week or whatever down to 0.

Hi - I too have been hospitalised a number of times with flare ups and ended up on similar doses of steroids to you. Each time it has been harder to decrease and a flare up has always restarted around the 10-15mg mark. This last time my consultant advised I decrease at the slowest rate ever ... I had been doing 5mg a week and he altered it to 1mg per month. This has worked for me and despite a small hiccup (and my impatience that I have speeded up to reducing every fornight) for the first time in years I'm down to 4mg with no probs.

As previous person said - slow as possible.

Thank you very much everyone.

So far so good, my doctor initially suggested going down to 2.5 from 5mg but after a few days
of just feeling like zombie it was obvious that 2.5mg was too low a dose for my body and brain
to function at that time.

So after some discussion we decided to go back upto 4mg and low and behold my brain
felt like it was working again. Unfortunately my doctor is away for a little while so I am
having to wait till he is back before seeing him again to discuss what rate to reduce it by,
however hopefully going down by 1mg a week/every ten days.

The only bad effects I have found from being on such a low dose have been that it
has made me feel agitated at times and I seem to be having problems with bouts of
worrying about silly things like the steroids will make me go mad etc.