Has Anyone Had To Wean Off Mirepex? If So, How Slow Was Your Schedule And What Were Your Experiences Doing It?
I need to wean off Mirepex because of allergic reaction (hives and itching). I need to do it slowly because just stopping it causes anxiety. Anyone have this experience and how did you do it.
You need to let your PD Doctor help wean you off. I took mirapex for a year. My Doctor took me off and it was to quick. I was real sick for over a week. Had to go to my Doctor, he put me back on it in a lower dose.
You need to come off slow.
OMG, my husband (who doesn't have PD), was dreaming about baseball and he hit the ball and was running to first base. He fell out of bed and cut his ear on the night table and spent the next few hours in the ER, getting stitched up. I can laugh about it now.
I had a terrible experience with lucid dreams while on Mirapex. I actually jumped out of bed, ran into the corner of the wall in my bedroom, and woke up as I was falling and heard my husband call out my name. I had a winner of a black eye from that episode. These dreams can be related to the PD, but I had read that they could be related to Mirapex, and other dopamine agonists, too. I went in to see my neurologist, and asked to be taken off it. I had been taking it since I was diagnosed in 2007. He told me that he would have been taking me off it anyway, as once you reach your 60s,(I am 62 now) it is not tolerated very well. We stepped down the dose over several days, but it was a good 2 weeks before I felt like myself again. I had some flushing episodes, like hot flashes but more intense and my anxiety increased.
I did some research on sleep disorders and learned that this type is called REM Sleep Behavior disorder. When we enter REM sleep, the dream portion of our sleep, our bodies actually become paralyzed, so we do not react to, or act out these dreams. In REM Sleep Behavior disorder, our brains fail to carry out this function and we can talk out loud, flail our arms around or even get up out of bed as I did. I found an easy fix for me, though. I take klonopin (clonazepam) for anxiety, but it also works for the REM Sleep disorder by relaxing us in our sleep just enough to convince our bodies that we are in that paralysis state. So my doctor and I moved the time I take the klonopin to before bed, and now, though I occasionally have these dreams, I do not act them out. My husband says the amount of talking out loud I do is much less. He says sometimes now I laugh out loud. It beats running into walls!
As it turns out the hives and itching were from an autoimmune disease, not from mirepex. However, each of us reacts differently to medication side effects. I didn't experience anything like what you mentioned.
Has Anyone Had To Wean Off Mirepex? If So, How Slow Was Your Schedule And What Were Your Experiences Doing It?
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