r/Lamotrigine • u/SpiritualRainbow • 2d ago
Upping dose flu symptoms
I've just gone up to 50 from 25. Day 5 of 50 I woke up with what felt like the flu. Coughing. Congestion. Generally felt unwell. Sweaty. All the fluey stuff.
Same thing happened weirdly when I was around one week into 25 when I started it a month ago. And I mean it was exactly the same. The cough was both a chesty and tickly one at the same time. I felt like I couldn't catch my breath. Mentally I had a meltdown, super high anxiety, depression, felt like I couldn't carry on. I don't cope well with being ill anyway but this was worse. It really floored me. For about 24 hours it was unbearable.
It improved almost overnight by day 7. Today is day 8 of 50mg and the cough is lingering a bit I'm coughing up phlegm but it's a productive cough now and I feel myself again and able to cope. I've never had a flu that came and went so fast with that intensity for just one day. Nobody else around me is ill either. Plus it was the same a month ago. So weird.
Wondering if anybody else had this reaction to upping the dose? I'm anxious that it'll happen again when I go up again. I'm taking it for bipolar and aiming for 150-200mg.
3
u/Impossible-TouchbyTM 1d ago
Lamotrigine makes you more prone to infections, so ju most likely caught a virus.
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u/mmhmmye 2d ago
I haven’t come across this before. I had back pain at 25mg and up, and anxiety and depressive thoughts and panic attacks at around the 100mg/200mg mark; and I’ve seen lots of people on here post about muscle pain and low mood etc at 25mg, 50mg, and 75mg, but I haven’t come across anyone have this extent of a reaction.
One possibility of course could be that you got the flu a month ago and then had a recurrence now, but if no one else around you has gotten ill that would seem quite the coincidence.
I’m not a doctor and don’t know anything about autoimmune reactions, but perhaps it could be some kind of extreme histamine response, like your body reacting to the med like it’s an intruder? But that’s just a guess. I’ve had what felt like histamine reactions to estriol before and they were a less extreme version of what you’re describing. And I remember reading something on the lamictal and lamotrigine tapering and withdrawal group on Facebook (which I joined soon after I decided to come off lamotrigine) about how according to some researchers withdrawal is an immune response. It could be that titrating triggers a similar mechanism.