Your Remicade Experience.

I started my Remicade about 3 weeks ago.  The 1^st week I had a major improvement (not out of the flare but much better).  The 2nd week I seemed to have worse symptoms.  I had my 2^nd infusion 6 days ago and have continued to flare and have UC type problems. I am not due to get an infusion again for 3 weeks since I am in the induction phase.

 

Anyone had similar experiences?  Did it take a while to work for you?

 

39/M

Remicade

100 mg  Azathioprine.

It didn't work for me. I did 3 infusions and didn't see improvement so my GI did a colonoscopy. If it would have showed improvement, he would have tried me on Remicade longer or upped the dose or frequency, but my UC was worse and spread throughout the entire colon so he stopped me on the Remicade and referred me to a surgeon.

My symptoms improved a little after the first infusion (didn't stop bleeding or urgency, but the frequency decreased), then improved more after the second, and by the third, I was doing quite well. I just had my 4th infusion last week and it went well-I haven't improved any further from it (I am going between 1-3 times/day with no blood or urgency), so I think this is as good as I am going to get with it, which is pretty good. (I did have to add Canasa back in though)

So my experience was slow improvement, but improvement all the same-I didn't get worse. I was on Humira prior to the Remicade and it worked much faster-but I eventually built antibodies to it.

My doc said the same thing as erinkate23's-he said it can take up to 4 or 5 infusions to really work for people.

     I built up antibodies rather quickly to Remicade, after my 3rd infusion.

i had a major improvement immediately after my first infusion in 2005 but the UC started breaking through a few months later after several infusions. my GI doubled the dose to 10 mg/kg & added 6-MP which put me into remission until late 2008.