Claritin (loratadine)

There was some research that found that desloratadine (metabolite of loratadine) could kill borrelia at concentrations much higher than could be reasonably achieved in vivo.

I decided to try taking a normal dose of claritin just to see what would happen, but I didn't expect much.

What happened was I felt nervous and needed to pee. Apparently this is a common side effect. I decided this wasn't going to work, so after a few days I quit taking it.

What I didn't expect was just how much herxing this seems to have caused. Even a week later, I am still herxing. I feel sick and ache all over. I wake up in the night with a fever and headache. My blood pressure is low from detoxing so much.

Is this a typical reaction to claritin?

i took desloratadine - the form that was used and found more effective against Borrelia in the study you mention

i took it for around 3 months i think in combination with doxycycline - as the study suggested that the desloratadine was able to disrupt the borrelia's ability to form persisters.
i took teh standard hay fever dose though - nothing like that used in the study in vitro.

i started the desloratadine before the docy by a few days and do not recall any herx from it - i did later have mild to moderate herx from teh doxy - that took a few weeks to lift

overall i stayed on doxy for around 9months adding azithromycin and rifampicin later for 6 and 3 months respectively - and had some mild to moderate benefit - but not a huge step

these antihistamine type drugs can themselves have some odd effects as after all they are doing something to signalling systems in the immune system and hence off target effects are common

If the claritin actually did anything, it was not the claritin alone. Something was hitting the bacteria that were already weakened by many rounds of antibiotics. Or maybe I'm just herxing from the summer heat. Borrelia does not like heat.

Maybe I will try another round later just to see what happens. I haven't tried benadryl either. Claritin seems to cause me quite a bit of side effects by itself, so that makes it hard to tell what happened.

The mast cell thing (ie runny nose, typical allergy symptoms) was one of my early symptoms of Lyme before I started antibiotics, and was one of the first symptoms to resolve when I started treatment, so I have not taken many antihistamines recently.