Invega's Pros and Cons - The Good, The Bad and The Funny. From People Who Have Taken These Crazy Meds...and SCIENCE!

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Invega's (paliperidone) Pros and Cons

As Invega (paliperidone) is merely the active metabolite of Risperdal (see the pages on how Invega works and comments for what that means for details) most of the pros and cons are comparisons with Risperdal. So if you take Risperdal now or if your doctor thinks that Risperdal is a good fit for you, here's why Invega would be better or worse for you.

Invega's Pros:

As Risperdal is metabolized into paliperidone by your liver anyway, taking Invega means your poor little liver won't have to work so hard as it would with Risperdal. This is beneficial if you are a very poor metabolizer or if you are taking loads of meds.
Which also means Invega has far fewer drug-drug interactions than Risperdal.
Between the lessened metabolization by the liver (most of Invega gets pissed away) and its being packaged in an OROS trilayer capsule, the people in the trials reported far fewer tummy troubles. Not much from the field. What has been reported confirms what is on the PI sheet, you are less likely to puke with Invega than anything else you'll see listed on Crazy Meds.
You have to take it only once a day, compared with taking Risperdal one to four times a day.
As Invega works the same in your brain as Risperdal, other than the fact it's working you can't even tell you're taking it for most applications. At least that's the theory. There's not enough anecdotal evidence (i.e. people who take it actually reporting on if it works or not) to back that up yet.
No titration is needed, in that you don't have to work up to the recommended dosage.

Invega's Cons:

Invega comes in three dosages: 3mg, 6mg and 9mg. Thus you have a lot less wiggle room when it comes to fine-tuning your dosage than you do with Risperdal.
While Risperdal tablets are small, Invega tablets are about the size of a multivitamin. So if you have trouble swallowing larger tablets (e.g. Depakote, Keppra, Neurontin 800mg tablets, and the larger dosages of Seroquel)
As you should never, ever cut an extended-release tablet of any medication you can't get a price break on buying the 6mg tablets and splitting them in half as you can with buying larger dosage tablets of Risperdal and splitting them in half. Let alone to try to help you swallow them.
Invega is just way more expensive than Risperdal. As many doctors are subject to "if a drug is new it must be better" syndrome, you may be better off with Risperdal, or even a dirt-cheap standard antipsychotic than Invega.
The entire side effect profile is derived from three six-week clinical trials and one eight-week outpatient study (see the effectiveness page for details). With that little time we don't really trust those numbers. There's not much in the way of people reporting what it's like to actually take the stuff where the side effects are much different from Risperdal, other than you really are less likely to barf up Invega than most any other crazy med around.

Click on these links to learn more about Invega:

Invega's Approved and Off-label Uses Invega's Pros and Cons Invega's Side Effects How to Take and Stop Taking Invega Invega's Effectiveness and Comparisons with Other Meds How Invega Works Buying Invega Global Invega PI Sheets and Other Links for Invega Comments Discuss Invega with your Fellow Crazies

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Invega in the News

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Take care of yourself, and keep taking your crazy meds!

Jerod

If you still have unanswered questions about this or other medications, including which one is, or combination of meds are the best for you, your best bet is to ask on Crazy Meds Talk. Better yet, if you want to let the world know how they worked out for you and want to help out others in their quest for the correct meds, join the party.
If you want to discuss your issues, I suggest checking out one of the various support groups online.
Otherwise, if you're letting me know about how much you like or hate the site, or need to let me know about medication effects in private, then just drop a note to jerod23 at gmail dot com Honestly, I usually don't have a lot of time to answer e-mail these days. The snide autoresponse message that may or may not hit your mailbox is going to tell you the same thing.
Another problem is that you may not get a response even if I wanted to send you one. You see, so many dickweeds with malicious intents and too much time on their hands have appropriated the crazymeds.org domain name to use for their spam, viruses and the like. Subsequently some lazy-ass e-mail protection software authors just go by the domain name, and not the IP address. So I've been blacklisted because of the actions of others. Or the software just doesn't like the domain name because of the "crazy" and/or "meds." Or your question about a particular medication will set off spam flags. So the e-mail just wouldn't go through regardless. Sorry.

Hey, did you find this page all by itself through Google or some other search engine? Great! But to really appreciate the entire site, you need to start here.

Dead tree references:

You must be joking! For a drug approved at the end of 2006 there's not going to be anything in books now. There will be something in expensive journals, some of which we'll get our hands on eventually. As it is general source material came from all of the following printed matter:

The PI sheet.

A handout from the pharmacy.

That's it for the paper-based stuff. Everything else in print about Invega is in the peer-reviewed journals, and for people like us those are practically gray literature. Outside of the abstracts on PubMed, we usually aren't getting much in the way of full text.

More general source material came from the following online sources:

Psychiatric News

Davis's Drug Guide

The Carlat Psychiatry Report

All other online sources, e.g. abstracts on PubMed, will have direct links to the source when used for specific references.

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Created Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Last updated Monday, May 24, 2010

Almost all of the material on this site is copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 Jerod Poore. Except, of course, the PI sheets, those are the property of the drug companies who developed the drugs the sheets are about. And any documents that are written by other people which may be posted to this site will remain the property of the original authors. You cannot reproduce this page or any other material on this site outside of the boundaries of fair use copying without the express permission of the copyright holder. That's usually me, so just ask first. That means if want to print out a few pages to take to your doctor, therapist, counselor, support group, non-understanding family members or something like that - then that's OK to just do. Go for it! Please. As long as you include this copyright notice and the following disclaimer, I'm cool with it.

All rights reserved. No warranty is expressed or implied in this information. Consult one or more doctors and pharmacists before taking, or changing how you take any neurological and/or psychiatric medication. Your mileage may vary. What happened to us won't necessarily happen to you. Nobody on this site is a doctor, therapist, or a pharmacist. We don't portray them either here or on TV. Only doctors can diagnose and treat an illness. Some doctors tend to get pissed off by patients who know too much about medications, so tread lightly when and where appropriate. Diagnosing yourself from a website is like defending yourself in court, you suddenly have a fool for a doctor. Don't be a cyberchondriac, thinking you have every disease you see a website about, or that you'll get every side effect from every medication. Self-prescribing is just as dangerous. All information on this site has been obtained through personal experience, the experiences of my friends, the experiences of people reported on online support groups, and from sources that are referenced throughout the site. Know your sources! As such the information presented here is not a substitute for real medical advice from your real doctor, just a compliment to it. No neurologists, psychiatrists, therapists or pharmacists were harmed in the production of this website. All brand names of the drugs listed in this site are the trademarks of the companies listed after them in the pages about the drugs, even though those companies may or may not have been acquired by other companies who may or may not be listed in this site by the time you read this. Always read the PI sheet that comes with your medications and never ever throw them away. If you didn't get a PI sheet, demand one. Loudly. Crazy Meds is not responsible for the content of sites we provide links to. We like them, or they're paid advertisements, or they're something you should read to make an informed decision about a particular med. Sometimes they're more than one of those things. But what's on those sites is their business, not ours. Very little information about visitors to this site is collected or saved. And from time to time I do look at search terms used to find it in an effort to make the information I present more relevant. Use only as directed. Void where prohibited.

"Everything is true, nothing is permitted." - Jerod Poore