Medications You Don,t Want To Take With Foods - And Those You Do By Dr. Tracey Marks

  

Hi, I'm Dr. Tracy Marks a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education articles. Today I'm popping in very briefly because I wanna tell you about medications that can be effected by taking them with or without food. It's not a terribly long list, thus, this being a brief  today, but none the less, it's important. Because sometimes medications, if you take them with food, can delay the absorption of the medicine, pushing back when it actually takes effect, or it can increase the concentration of the medication in your blood stream, increased concentration can mean increased side effects, or it can reduce the amount of the drug that's absorbed. 

Reduced absorption means that you're not getting as much of it in your blood stream. And therefore you can take a medication that way and think, gosh, this medicine doesn't work for me. This is a failure. Well, it may not be a failure if you took it with food. So here's the short list of medicines that are affected that way. And I'll have a hand out fo ryou with these medications that you can download from my website at marks psychiatry.com. If you're on my email list, you already have this hand out in your inbox. For this article, I'm gonna say the brand name, but the generic names are included on the handout.

 First is the sleeping medicines. Have you ever taken sleeping pills before, and it took forever for you to feel sleepy? It could be because you took the medicine too close to eating your last meal. Several of the sleepy medications should not be taken with food because food delays the effect of the medication by delaying absorption. These medications include Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata, and Trazadone. If you take them too close to eating the food effect can delay when you start to feel sleepy by an hour or more. This is a big deal. 

If you're taking the medicine to help you fall asleep, you don't wanna lie in bed for an hour or two waiting for the medicine to kick in. So what would be considered an empty stomach? Well, generally we consider it anywhere between one and three hours since you last ate. Since this is a medicine that you would take at bed time, I usually advise people to have dinner two to three hours before they wanna take the medication. 

In case you're someone who reads the medication handoutsor labels as we call them, the label for Trazodone will say to take with food because food increases the amount of Trazodone available. So you get a little bumpin the concentration, but the label also says that food delays the effect of the drug by one hour. Well, Trazodone is FD Aapproved for depression, and that's its intended use, but it's rarely used for that purpose, and mainly used to treat insomnia. 

So that said the food delay becomes more important than that bump in concentration. So it's still best to take it on an empty stomach. Another medication that you don't wanna take with food is Seroquel extended release formulation. We use Seroquel for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Seroquel immediate release version has a lot of side effects, including feeling very tired and sleepy, may be even dizzy. So they came out with the extended release version to help smooth out some of those effects, so that you can take it duringthe day and still function. 

If you take it with a full meal,especially a high fat meal, the food causes a sharprise in how much you have in your blood stream, and you may get the same side effects that you would get with the immediate release version. So it's not horrible if you take it with food, but you can end up having some of the same side effects as the immediate release version, and then it's kind of no point in taking the extended release version.

 Next are the medications that do not work as well, if you take them with food because food decreases the bio availability of the medication. This means that less of it is available to be absorbed in your blood stream. And these medicationsare Latuda and Geodon, which are both antipsychotic medications that we use for bipolar disorder and sc.