Posted by JD on May 5, 1999, at 5:49:10
In reply to Re: Half Life--JD, posted by JD on May 5, 1999, at 5:36:36
I'll throw in one final thing based on your question, just cause this can be so confusing-- As I said, If you took 10mg Celexa, you could probably expect half of it to still be around in 35 hours. But since the 10mg dose would probably be on top of the past days' Celexa that was still left in your system, you'd also have 50% of that amount left after 35 hours too. The whole thing can be like one big, nightmarish math problem! ;-)
- JD
> That's just the thing--without getting technical, in most antidepressants a half-life is a half-life regardless of the initial amount; your body just gets rid of half that amount within the set time period. (On the contrary, a good example of a drug that's NOT like this is alcohol...) So the half-life of 10mg of Celexa would likely be around 35 hours too (i.e., about 5mg worth of it would still be in your system after 35 hours). Another way of looking at how this works is that your body basically gets rid of the drug at a rate that's proportional to how much is in your body at a given time, so the size of the dose doesn't make much of a difference for the half-life except in particular cases (like say massive doses). By the way, your mention of half-doses might be an interesting way to approach working out your situation, too.
>
> Hope this helps. --JD
>
> > Thanks JD--I feel like I've had a very
> > thorough, complete and interesting inservice on
> > half lives! One more question for you though--
> > if the half life of 20 mg's of celexa is 35 hours,
> > would the half life of 10 mg's be 17 hours?
poster:JD
thread:5528
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19990501/msgs/5611.html