Questions about more frequent Inflectra infusions

Hey Haley,
After my loading doses of inflectra, they put me on 8 week maintenance. I certainly recovered quite a bit, but still had some minor issues. They got my levels and suggested 6 weeks. I just completed by 3rd 6week maintenance today actually and I had super healthy BMs this whole past week. I’ve had no side effects. I did test positive for Covid. I was double vaxed no booster. With covid I had a fever for 24 hours, and lethargy for 4 days, back to work that Monday.
I’ve noticed from a few posts of yours you have had mixed results so far with Inflectra. Thats ok! I still do a lot of stuff for my UC outside of inflectra appointments, like meditation, pescatarian diet, probiotics and slippery elm, CBD, peppermint tea with manuka honey and lemon balm, so maybe adding in a few tweaks of your own will help the medicine do its thing. I believe in you! You got this!

Good questions. I don't know about Remicade specifically. I know people on the higher dose of Xeljanz have a higher risk of serious infections, shingles, or skin cancers.

I also know that I experienced no side effects on the typical dose of Humira, but had a horrible (and rare) side effect when we increased it to weekly (it went away shortly after discontinuing the Humira). My Humira levels were good before the dose increase, but it wasn't working so my GI said we could try increasing the dosage anyway. After that bad experience, I never increased my dose of any of the other biologics when my levels came back normal.

I have since moved on from Inflectra but was on a four-week interval of Inflectra for a couple years. I had the same question about risk of infection. This may be different from person to person but my doctor informed me that there is NOT an increased risk. It's likely you're going up in frequency because your levels are not high enough/ you're not responding as well, which indicates there is not enough medicine in your system to be considered therapeutic. This means your body is metabolizing the medicine quicker at eight-month intervals (than it would at four-month) so you have to refill earlier, kind of like a tank of gas. So technically, there is not MORE medicine in your system because your body is cycling it out, so the risk of infection would remain the same. This is from what my doc told me just FYI so it's simply my experience. Just email your GI and ask this question I'm sure they get it a lot