OT- friend just put on 1000mg/day prednisone

Has anyone heard of a dose this high? She was diagnosed with ms and they put her on 1000mg/day for three days to try and stop it. I feel so bad for her, I hated being on just 45mg/day! I didn't even know doses that high could be given?

Wow! When I read the subject line I was sure there was a misstype there and that it should have been 100mgs. This is a very fascinating idea though. I wonder what the outcome is or was. Surely this person would drop dead not tapering.

The taper is necessary because when you take prednisone for a long time, your body stops producing its own, so you need to give it time to ramp up its own production (when you get below ~10mg/day, that's generally when your body gets the message to start production again). If you take steroid pills at ANY dose for a short period of time (less than two weeks), there's no need to taper because your body doesn't stop producing cortisol.

And no, they don't always taper, often the steroids are given iv with absolutely no oral taper.

MS can be more serious than IBD/UC so it's understandable. I rather deal with ulcers in my colon than inflammation of the nervous tissue in the brain or pressure ulcers.

Katarzyna said...
MS can be more serious than IBD/UC so it's understandable. I rather deal with ulcers in my colon than inflammation of the nervous tissue in the brain or pressure ulcers.

And I'd rather still have my colon, ulcerated or otherwise. Good grief. Edit: Also, your colon can kill you. People with severe IBD routinely died in the days before steroids and modern surgery. Not saying I'd rather have MS, because I wouldn't. But severe IBD is not a benign disease.

@Pluot - I get a 403 Forbidden error with that link.

Post Edited (NiceCupOfTea) : 3/4/2014 11:39:52 AM (GMT-7)

Pluot said...
Sorry, maybe it's blocked overseas. I'm sure you can find the article on Google, it's entitled "The Practical Use of Corticosteroids in the Treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease"

I did and it was still blocked, but I managed to get the cached version.

Doesn't make sense to me. I feel too lazy to google it, but does anyone know if there are any other diseases which require these mega doses of steroids?

Meh, I did do a quick google... Offhand, there doesn't seem to be: reference.medscape.com/drug/prednisone-intensol-342747

Is that 1000 mg cortisone as opposed to pred? That would be equivalent to 250 mg pred or so but still very high.

Pluot said...
Sorry, maybe it's blocked overseas. I'm sure you can find the article on Google, it's entitled "The Practical Use of Corticosteroids in the Treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease"

Nice article. Thanks. PFD was not blocked for me. There are some reviews in this series from 2013 that I am going to download.

how old is she?

NiceCupOfTea said...

Katarzyna said...
MS can be more serious than IBD/UC so it's understandable. I rather deal with ulcers in my colon than inflammation of the nervous tissue in the brain or pressure ulcers.

And I'd rather still have my colon, ulcerated or otherwise. Good grief. Edit: Also, your colon can kill you. People with severe IBD routinely died in the days before steroids and modern surgery. Not saying I'd rather have MS, because I wouldn't. But severe IBD is not a benign disease.

@Pluot - I get a 403 Forbidden error with that link.

Oh that is definitely true. If I had a choice, I would choose neither and be perfectly healthy. But we're all dreamers here, right?

laughingduck said...

Katarzyna said...
MS can be more serious than IBD/UC so it's understandable. I rather deal with ulcers in my colon than inflammation of the nervous tissue in the brain or pressure ulcers.

I agree, I don't know much about ms, but from what. I do know, I'd way rather have uc! At least we have the option of surgery if nothing else works. I feel so bad she is dealing with both ms and diabetes. I actually just heard from her, she is on third day at 1000, and other than a headache had no side effects! Didn't even need sleeping pills. She said she actually goes to 100mg for three days now, then I assume she's off it. Her ms symptoms are still there though. :(

Yeah it's a really bad thing. My friend has MS too and she is always telling me how much pain she is in. The friend tried that treatment but it made her worse. So now she is taking some injections into her thigh once every week or two weeks, I forget which. I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work for her. It was the same for my friend.

Post Edited (Katarzyna) : 3/4/2014 2:43:06 PM (GMT-7)