Keppra-XR (levetiracetam) Side Effects

from the common to the rare; how long they last & how to deal with them

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‹ Pros & Cons, Interesting Stuff Your Doctor Didn’t Tell You | Keppra-XRPagesIndex | Blackbox Warning & Noted Traits ›
Crazy Meds Comprehensive Keppra-XR pages

1.  About Side Effects

Potential side effects (adverse events in fancy pharmaceutical talk) are often used as a rationalization to not take a medication. Many people will stop taking an otherwise working drug because of one or more side effects that are relatively minor and/or often temporary. There may even be ways to counter or mitigate the problematic effects.

It all comes down to a very simple equation: which sucks less?

There is no perfect drug. If you keep switching meds in the hopes of finding something with no side effect, or irrelevant side effects that don’t bug you as much, you could wind up treatment-resistant, and a med that worked before may work as well as it did the first time, if at all.

1.1  Side Effects All Crazy Meds Have

No matter which neurological and/or psychiatric drug you take, you’ll probably get one or more of these side effects. These will usually be gone, or at least will diminish to the point where you barely notice it most of the time, within a week or two.

• Headache
• Drowsiness / fatigue - even when taking stimulants in some circumstances.
• Insomnia, instead of or alternating with the drowsiness.
• Nausea
• Assorted other minor GI complaints (constipation, diarrhea, etc.)
• Generally feeling spacey / out of it
  • Which can all add up to the ever-helpful “flu-like symptoms” listed as an adverse event on the PI sheet of practically every medication on the planet used to treat almost any condition humans and other animals could have.
• All crazy meds can, and probably will affect your dreams as well. There is no way of telling if that will be good or bad, let alone if this side effect is permanent or temporary.

So don’t operate any heavy machinery and try to avoid driving the first couple of days. We always recommend¹ starting a new med Friday night / Saturday morning (or whenever your day off is) so you have an idea of how it will affect you for the first week or two. Keep in mind: most side effects are usually temporary in nature.

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2.  Keppra-XR (levetiracetam) Typical Side Effects

Most everyone gets at least one or two of these

• Like most AEDs: sleepiness, headache, and dizziness/vertigo.
• What most crazy meds have as uncommon-to-rare, but are common side effects for Keppra:
  • Muscle weakness
  • Various kinds of infections-rhinitis, pharyngitis, sinusitis, and assorted nose problems.
• Another nice thing about Keppra - its side effects are almost always dosage-dependent. So the more you take, the more likely and/or more severe the side effects will be. Why is that nice? Because it’s predictable. Few things about epilepsy and AEDs are predictable.

3.  Keppra-XR (levetiracetam) Uncommon Side Effects

You may or may not get one or more of these, so don’t be surprised either way

• The mood problems-depression, psychosis, hostility, anxiety in various forms (I know, it’s supposed to be good for anxiety. But yet…drugs are weird…).
• Appetite changes one way or another.
• Paresthesia, aka that fun tingling in your extremities like Topamax does.

4.  Potentially Dangerous Side Effects of Keppra-XR (levetiracetam)

If you have one or more of these, call your doctor ASAP. Or now. Or get the hell off of the Internet and go to the ER. NOW!
The only potentially dangerous side effects Keppra has are the same as every AED on the planet. They’re just even less likely to happen than with any of the others.

• Like all AEDs it can eat your blood. I.e. it can cause various blood dyscrasia (bad stuff), including
  • leukopenia and neutropenia (low white cell count)
  • thrombocytopenia (low platelets count)
  • pancytopenia (low everything count, you might as well have water in your veins)
• Like all AEDs it can eat your skin. I.e. it can cause potentially deadly skin disorders:
  • Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS better known as the Lamictal Rash)
  • toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN)
  • erythema multiforme (similar to SJS, usually not as bad)

5.  Keppra-XR Freaky Rare Side Effects

You won’t get these. Unless you already have and that’s why you’re here

• Peace-Love-and-Fluffy-Bunnies-Not-Manic-Just-Happy! Ok, so Kassiane is the only one who got that for very long.
• Status gelasticus. An AED exacerbating, or even causing seizures is neither freaky nor rare. Status gelasticus though is a freaky rare type of seizure. In this poor girl’s case she had eight straight hours of bursts of laughter every 15–20 seconds.

For all known side effects, see the Keppra-XR (levetiracetam) full US prescribing information. Or really indulge your paranoia by reading every PI sheet in the world we can find.

6.  Ways to Counter/Minimize/Deal with Some Side Effects of Keppra-XR (levetiracetam)

Be sure to read the page on how to deal with side effects common to all crazy meds for more tips

• Reduce the dosage.
• We’ve found that the psychiatric side effects like depression, psychosis, and especially rage can sometimes be mitigated by taking the immediate release form three times a day instead of twice a day. It doesn’t always work, but the track record is pretty good, so it’s worth a shot.
  

We don’t have any data at all on if that works with Keppra XR form.

• Another way to deal with psychiatric side effects: Take Lamictal.

‹ Pros & Cons, Interesting Stuff Your Doctor Didn’t Tell You | Keppra-XR Index | Blackbox Warning & Noted Traits ›
Crazy Meds Comprehensive Keppra-XR pages

Bibliography

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¹ If you have the luxury of both a job and being able to cope with your symptoms not being dealt with for however many days you need to wait in order to do this. Read enough of this site and you can tell I live in a fantasy world.

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Date created Tuesday, 04 October 2011 at 11:12:28 Page Author: Last edited by: Jerod Poore on June 14, 2013, at 02:11 PM

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Keppra-XR Side Effects by is copyright 2011

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¹ While there are plenty of books to help you with hypochondria, for some reason there’s not much in the way of websites. Then again, staying off of the Internet is a large part of curing/managing the disorder.

² Remember kids, Microsloth operating systems are like TOS Star Trek movies with in that every other one sucks way, way more. With TOS Star Trek movies you don’t want to bother watching the odd-numbered ones. With Microsloth OS you don’t want to buy and install the even-numbered ones. Anyone who remembers ME and Vista knows what I mean.

³ Have I mentioned how open source operating systems for commercial applications is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb ideas?
[begin rant] I rent a dedicated server for Crazy Meds. It’s sitting on a rack somewhere in Southern California along with a bunch of other servers that other people have rented. The hardware is identical, but no two machines have exactly the same operating systems. I don’t even need to see what is on any of the others to know this. If somebody got their server at the exact same time, with the exact same features as I did, I’m confident that there would be noticeable differences in some aspects of the operating systems. So what does this mean? For one thing it means that no two computers in the same office of a single company have the same operating system, and the techs can spend hours figuring out what the fuck the problem could be based on that alone. It also means that application software like IP board that runs the forum here has to have so many fucking user-configurable bells and whistles that even when I read the manual I can’t find every setting, or every location that every flag needs to be set in order for a feature to run the way I want it to run. And in the real world it means you can get an MBA not only with an emphasis on resource planning, but with an emphasis on using SAP - a piece of software so complex there are now college programs on how to use it. You might think, “But don’t people learn how to use Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator in college?” Sure, in order to create stuff. And in a way you’re creating stuff with SAP. But do you get a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis on Photoshop?
Back in the Big Iron Age the operating systems were proprietary, and every computer that took up an entire room with a raised floor and HVAC system, and had less storage and processing power than an iPhone, had the same operating system as every other one, give or take a release level. But when a company bought application software like SAP, they also got the source code, which was usually documented and written in a way to make it easy to modify the hell out of it. Why? Because accounting principles may be the same the world over, and tax laws the same across each country and state, but no two companies have the same format for their reports, invoices, purchase orders and so forth. Standards existed and were universally ignored. If something went wrong it went wrong the same way for everyone, and was easy to track down. People didn’t need to take a college course to learn how to use a piece of software.
I’m not against the open source concept entirely. Back then all the programmers read the same magazines, so we all had the same homebrew utilities. We even had a forerunner of QR Code to scan the longer source code. Software vendors and computer manufacturers sponsored conventions so we could, among other things, swap recipes for such add-ons and utilities. While those things would make our lives easier, they had nothing to do with critical functions of the operating system. Unless badly implemented they would rarely cause key application software to crash and burn. Whereas today, with open source everything, who the hell knows what could be responsible some part of a system failing. [/end rant]

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