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Click on these links to learn more about Keppra:
Basic Information About Keppra
Keppra's Side Effects
Keppra's Dosage, Discontinuation and
Half-Life Keppra's Effectiveness, Comparison with Other Meds and Ratings
How
Keppra Works in Your Brain Page Buying Keppra
& Keppra PI Sheets Special Effects &
Issues with Keppra
Comments
Keppra's (levetiracetam) Dosage, Discontinuation & Half-Life
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What is Keppra's Dosage: The normal dosage of Keppra is 1000-3000 mg a day. That is considered the therapeutic range for epilepsy. The drug company says you can start right in at 1000mgs, taken as 500mg twice daily, which is, as you can see, the bottom of the therapeutic range. One moderately-sized double-blind study even concludes you can start at 2000-4000mg a day if required. Even Dr. Faught in the edition of PeerView in Review on traditional and new antiepileptic drugs thinks thinks that Keppra can be titrated as stated, unlike any of the others (including Ortho-McNeil's Topamax, the sponsor of the program). Guess what? I disagree. There is a REASON they make 250mg tablets, and there is a REASON they are so easy to cut in half! I don’t think most people need to start quite that low, but 500mg, taken as 250 twice a day, is reasonable to start if you're not completely flipping out. That’s where the off-label bipolar studies show them starting, by the way. Then a 250mg step-up weekly, 125mg if it hits really hard. Not every 5 days, A WEEK. SEVEN DAYS. Those extra 2 days can make a big difference in getting used to a med. If less than traditional doses work for someone, then fine and wonderful. I am a big believer in the correct dose isn’t necessarily what the PI sheet says, it is the one that works. Also with a half-life of only 6-8 hours, you may want to try taking it three times a day instead of two if you find yourself experiencing the Keppra irritability. Taking Keppra with food will delay Keppra's peak availability by an average of an hour and a half, and can sometimes cut down on how much Keppra you absorb by up to 20%. Overdosing on can suck, but it probably won't kill you.
How Long Keppra Takes to Work: Not very. Like, as in two days not very. Even for refractory epilepsy Keppra can start working in one day.
How to STOP taking Keppra: Slowly, unless being on Keppra is sucking serious ass. And this is why I don’t like starting a med at a therapeutic dose. OK. End soapbox. Generally, the way you went up—was it in 250mg increments, 500mg increments? Please say it wasn’t in 1000mg increments. How you went up on Keppra is how you should go down from Keppra —500 to 250 every 5 to 7 days.
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What is Keppra's Half-life: 6-8 hours for average metabolizers.
Average Time to Keppra to Clear Out of Your System: 1-2 days. It goes in fast, it goes out fast.
Days to Reach a Steady State: Two days. Fast acting, this is.
Keppra's Peak Time: One and one-half hours after you take it, expect it to REALLY hit, provided you have normal absorption and all. The drug itself is soaked up right away when you take it.
Check for Drug-Drug Interactions

Click on these links to learn more about Keppra:
Basic Information About Keppra
Keppra's Side Effects
Keppra's Dosage, Discontinuation and
Half-Life Keppra's Effectiveness, Comparison with Other Meds and Ratings
How
Keppra Works in Your Brain Page Buying Keppra
& Keppra PI Sheets Special Effects &
Issues with Keppra
Comments

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Visit the Support Page for how you can help if you don't have any money laying around. This includes reviewing Crazy Meds for Amazon.com and/or
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Check for Drug-Drug Interactions
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:
Physicians' Desk Reference Edition 59 Min Ko and Greg Tallis, Drug Information Specialists, et al. © 2005. Published by Thomson PDR.
Neurology for Psychiatrists Gin S. Malhi, Manjit S. Matharu & Anthony S. Hale. © 2000. Published by Martin Dunitz
Mosby's 2004 Drug Guide David Nissen PharmD, Editor.© 2004. An imprint of Elsevier. The edition we're using isn't listed on Amazon.
End of books used for this article.
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Created Saturday, August 06, 2005
Last updated Monday, May 24, 2010
Content Copyright © 2005 Kassiane S.. Format Copyright 2005 Jerod Poore. All rights reserved.
Almost all of the material on this site is copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 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
