Vivitrol (Naltrexone) – Dosage and Effects - Alcohol Anti Addiction Medication, Medical Detox, Alcohol Detox
Vivitrol is an injection of alcohol anti-addiction medication that you receive in the gluttial (buttock) muscle once a month. During that month period, it slowly releases alcohol anti-addiction medication called naltrexone into your blood stream. The Vivitrol (long-acting naltrexone) basically helps to prevent relapse to alcohol addiction use by causing three things to occur.
Consequently, Vivitrol works very quickly and has very few side effects. The primary side effects of this alcohol anti-addiction medication are nausea (which only occurs sometimes, and usually only during the first 2-3 days of the first injection), occasional headache, some tenderness at the injection site for a short time afterwards, and some drowsiness. All of these symptoms are mild in most cases and much less toxic or evident than are the side effects alcohol addiction. Consequently, Vivitrol is very safe, well tolerated (meaning it has few side effects), and is not addictive.
One of the reasons that Vivitrol has few side effects is the unique way that it gets into the blood stream. By being injected into the muscle and then released into the blood stream from the muscle, the naltrexone alcohol anti-addiction medication initially avoids going through the liver before it goes into the rest of the body. One of the liver’s main functions is to break down different substances (including medications). When any medication is able to bypass the liver initially, less of it is destroyed, so more of it is available to be used by various parts of the body. Therefore, theoretically, you need a much lower dose to be effective.
Fortunately this is the case with Vivitrol. Remember that Vivitrol is just a time-released naltrexone. If you take naltrexone by mouth (orally), you need to take 50 mg/day for 30 days. At 50 mg/day oral naltrexone is safe, well tolerated, and has the same types of side effects as described above for Vivitrol. Because Vivitrol bypasses the liver, you only need 380 mg/month of Vivitrol to treat alcoholism. Consequently, the fact that you need almost a 70% smaller dose of naltrexone through the use of Vivitrol in your body each month, may account for the minimal side effects experienced by most patients on it.
In addition to the nausea issue mentioned above, there is what the FDA calls a “black box warning” on the package insert for both Vivitrol and naltrexone alcohol anti-addiction medications. This black box warning merely suggests that you might get significant medical problems if you use Vivitrol or naltrexone for a long period of time without appropriate monitoring of the liver’s functions with blood tests. In fact, the black box warning for Vivitrol specifically states that there is no evidence of toxicity with Vivitrol.
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