Prednisone taper

I think it matters how long you have been currently taking this course of Prednisone. If I get my symptoms under control within a month, my doctor allows me to taper 10 mg per week. However I have had flares where every time I tried to taper AT ALL, my symptoms would come rushing back. For me, my body lets me know if I am tapering too fast, and my advice would be to get off of the prednisone as quickly as your body allows. To me this seems like a reasonable taper though...

Prednisone is different for everyone, so you shouldnt be comparing your taper with others really cause it varies so much and might just confuse the hell out of you. The reasons they vary are due to the persons UC symptoms and how serious the flare is etc. Also some people just respond better to prednisone, some develope tolerances to it etc.

But I can tell you some basics about it. If your fairly new to prednisone its probably going to work fast and you wont need that long of a taper or a high dosage. In my expierences with prednisone if your UC symptoms are not gone within the first two highest dosage tapers and you keep tapering your UC flare will most likely come right back to full strength as you never really got rid of it. And like UC said you get off it as quickly as your body allows, I am curently on a tapper i started at 60mg for 2 weeks and now have been stuck at 40mg now for 3 weeks...it sucks cause i am seeing some bad side effects. There are many tapers out there...yours looks like a basic example. Hope it works for you.

Hi Guys,

Do not want to alarm anyone but tapering steroids can be life threatening if you cut too quickly, your body needs time to have the capability to make cortisol again and, personally, I go by 5 mg every 7 days to 10 mg and then I go by 1 mg per 5 days till I feel I can cut completely and so I am told by my specialist that the last few milligrammes are the ones to keep longest.  I have 3 times tapered a little too quickly, had terrible headaches and lots more and then flared up within a month at most so have not really been off of the roids much at all.

I would suggest you speak to your professionals and make sure you suffer less and have a good chance for your own cortisol to be made before you cut the steroid completely.

As before , I am only offering advice and in no way is this to be confused with being told a definite.  I am still learning myself, each day is another lesson but I do have some good people around me now on a popular networking site that help me and encourage me greatly and i truly wanted to just die.  I have learned that we all have many problems that add to this illness but that there can be times that remission will come with no real effort. A definite that I can say is that we all can react differently to the meds and some of us get very bad side effects from the immune suppressants, me being one of them.

One guy gave me perspective today by telling me " This is not a life threatening disease" and I truly needed to hear that, the surgery is not a nice or good thing but it is an end to this so for those , like me, that cannot go down the immune suppression route, that is an option and life can return to a decent level. I would wager tha many of the Crohn's people would take this op is they knew it would be an end to it.  I am now thinking of having the diseased part of my colon removed first and hope that it will stop, if not then J pouch. I don't mean to sound cold but we do have a cure even if that cure is a very harsh option.

PLEASE take care with the cutting regimens of steroids good people.

Much love to you all and blessing be upon you ALL

Julian x 

Hi all,

I had an alarmed young girl talk to me today who is back flaring up as she has cut to 15mg of pred and the specialists have told her she needs endoscopy and colonoscopy as she should be improving and they have scared her witless with cancer stories. I just wanted to say that not all of us get better on steroids and many then flare when cutting down and that this is not unusual. I would have hoped these specialist would have told her to go back up to a point where she was asymptomatic and then cut more slowly. I am so angry at these people scaring others with no good reason. Pred is not a cure and we all react differently.

Hope you all have as good a weekend as possible

Julian

Hi Beth,

I notice you are on Azathioprine( Imuran). I was under the impression that if you take the immune suppressants then you should be in remission ?. I was told they call them steroid sparing drugs but that they can take anything up to 6 months to work properly. I just noticed several people on these drugs but still flaring and wonder if it is worth doing if this still happens.

Waddyathink ?

Julian