Luvox (fluvoxamine maleate)

US Brand Name: Luvox

generic name: fluvoxamine maleate

Class: Antidepressant, because Luvox is one of the first SSRIs.² As far as approved uses goes, it’s an anxiolytic/anti-anxiety drug.

1.  Other brand names & branded generic names¹

• Anwu (Taiwan)
• Dumirox (Korea, Spain, Uruguay)
• Dumyrox (Greece, Portugal)
• Faverin (Israel, Australia, England, Hong Kong, Ireland, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey)
• Favoxil (Israel)
• Fevarin (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Turkey)
• Floxyfral (Austria, Belgium, France, Switzerland)
• Fluvohexal (Germany)
• Fluvoxin (India)
• Lote (Taiwan)
• Luvox (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, South Africa, Taiwan, Venezuela)
• Movox (Australia)
• Voxamin (Colombia)

2.  FDA Approved Uses of Luvox (fluvoxamine)

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

3.  Off-Label Uses of Luvox

• Depression
• Panic
• Generalized social anxiety
• Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder
• Binge eating - two studies, one big and one small indicate that SSRIs just aren’t much good for binge eating.
• Combat PTSD

4.  Luvox’s pros and cons

4.1  Pros

• Proven as the best med for OCD.
• Generally less agitating than other SSRIs.
• Tends to work faster than other SSRIs, except Lexapro.

4.2  Cons

• Who the hell prescribes Luvox? There’s just not much in the way of support from Solvay. http://www.luvox.com resolves to an Abbott site for Luvox in Japan.
• The short half-life can make discontinuation difficult.
• It doesn’t have as many drug-drug interactions as Provigil or fish oil, but it’s as bad, if not worse than warfarin when it comes to the ones it does have.

5.  Side Effects

5.1  Typical Side Effects

The usual for SSRIs - headache, nausea, dry mouth, sweating, sleepiness or insomnia, and diarrhea or constipation, weight gain, loss of libido. Most everything will go away after a week or two, but the weight gain and loss of libido might stick around longer. Or permanently.

5.2  Not So Common Side Effects

Worsening of symptoms, be it anxiety, depression or OCD. Even if you’re taking Luvox for one thing you might get the symptoms of something else.³

5.3  Freaky Rare Side Effects

Agoraphobia, fecal incontinence, priapism. Time to stay inside and make the freakiest scat video ever!

6.  Interesting Stuff Your Doctor Probably Won’t Tell You

• Mixing caffeine and Luvox (fluvoxamine) can be intensely unpleasant.
  • From first study -

• If you smoke you’ll increase the metabolism of Luvox (fluvoxamine) by 25% to 60%. That’s out of the PI sheet, with a study backing it up. So you’ll get less out of it. Somehow that’s ironic for a med that is officially approved only for OCD, as nicotine is an effective treatment for OCD. No, really, nicotine reduces OCD and various anxiety symptoms.

7.  Luvox’s Dosage and How to Take Luvox (fluvoxamine)

The initial dose is 50 mg at bedtime, increased by 50 mg a day every four to seven days as needed until the maximum dose of 300 mg a day is reached. Like any SSRI I recommend starting out with 25mg and then increasing to 50mg after a week. If you don’t feel anything go up to 100mg, but stay there until you’ve given it a try for a month, otherwise it’ll just be a pain in the ass to stop it. Even at 100mg you’ll know after a month if Luvox is going to do something for you.

8.  How Long Luvox Takes to Work

Like all SSRIs anywhere from a couple days to over a month. If you don’t feel any positive benefit after a few weeks, then you should talk to your doctor about either another SSRI or trying a med that hits another neurotransmitter.

9.  How to Stop Taking Luvox

Your doctor should be recommending that you reduce your dosage 25–50mg every 4 days if you need to stop taking it. Because its half-life is so short and the steady state is non-linear, best to go for 25mg. Maybe even 12.5mg if the discontinuation seems harsh. A study specific to fluvoxamine withdrawal shows that if you stop taking Luvox abruptly you might wind up with SSRI discontinuation syndrome. Ya think?

10.  Luvox’s Half-Life & Average Time to Clear Out of Your System

With a half-life of 15.6 hours, the shortest of all true SSRIs⁴, Luvox (fluvoxamine) is out of your body in about 80 hours.

11.  Days to Reach a Steady State

The steady state for Luvox is non-linear. That means if you change the dosage, the steady state gets hosed. So Solvay doesn’t publish any steady state data. Figure at least a week, maybe two, after your last dosage adjustment.

12.  Comments

Note that Luvox (fluvoxamine) is not technically an antidepressant. It’s just one of two meds of which I’m aware that are officially approved only for OCD in the US. And why is it so good for OCD? It’s all about the sigma-1 receptor, and fluvoxamine likes sigma-1. Zoloft is another meds that is especially effective for anxiety disorders, and it is also sigma-1 agonists.

Brand name Luvox has currently been withdrawn from the US market. It may or may not return. Generic fluvoxamine is still available in the US.

We know that nicotine makes you clear Luvox a lot faster and nicotine is an effective treatment for OCD. So what would happen if a poor metabolizer of CYP1A2 substrates with OCD combined Luvox with nicotine. Synergistic effect or just a wash?

13.  Discussion board

Crazy Meds’ Luvox discussion board

14.  Your Comments About and Experiences with Luvox

What was your experience like?

Ergh - Don’t ever miss a dose if you can - even if you reckon you’ll be right.. I’m on 150mg per day and I have found that if i forget for a few days to take it I get a numb feeling in waves that goes through my body and headaches..

Also, I am trying everything I can to loose wieght and I can’t do it.. It sucks! If anyone knows of a good way to do this.. !! Thanks!

I started taking Luvox 3 months ago to manage acute OCD and it literally has saved my life. I went from sitting on my mothers couch, back home in Adelaide, and not been able to speak as I concentrated on managing the thoughts to being able to return to work in Sydney and enjoy life again. Don’t get my wrong there has been and will be some speed humps but I have hope again.

My OCD pre-Luvox was out of control for the last 3 months and had been awful for the 9 months prior. For me it manifests in revolting thoughts and frankly I was struggling to see a reason to keep going. However with the Luvox they have been bought much more in control and indeed I have large times without them at all. MY GOD! I didnt think it possible.

If this wasnt enough there have been two other great pluses for Luvox for me over Lexapro; 1, the sexual side effect is minimal (sure I cant cum twice a day but am happy with once that is strong and pleasurable) and 2, I dont gain weight on it. These are such great bonuses for me and I dont want to seem to be gloating for those who don’t interact as such but I am so excited about that.

With Lexapro my weight really ballooned out and ejaculating was a cruel memory.

My psycharist recently had me lift the dosage from 100 mg to 200 mg. The rationale been to really consolidate the gains made plus assist in quite a stressful time for me and that has been a little difficult however I am confident that with the right dosage (maybe 150 mg) and time taking the drug that I have a very bright future.

I could have never said that 3 months ago!

Lastly I would like to say that this website rocks! It bought me comfort when I was struggling that there was hope.

Enter your own Comments & Experiences with Luvox here.
You must be a registered member of the Crazy Meds Talk forum to post a comment on this page.

19.  Full US PI sheet, Global SPCs & PILs, check for drug-drug interactions

Luvox Full US Prescribing Information / PI Sheet
UK Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC) for Faverin

UK Patient Information Leaflet (PIL) for Faverin

Check for drug-drug interactions

20.  Bibliography

Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical Applications (Essential Psychopharmacology Series) 3rd edition Stephen M. Stahl

Physicians’ Desk Reference Edition 56 Maria Deutsch & Anu Gupta, Drug Information Specialists, et al. © 2002. Published by Medical Economics Company.

Instant Psychopharmacology 2nd Edition Ronald J. Diamond M.D. © 2002. Published by W.W. Norton

The Complete Guide to Psychiatric Drugs Edward Drummond, M.D. © 2000. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Mosby’s 2004 Drug Guide David Nissen PharmD, Editor. © 2004. An imprint of Elsevier.

Fluvoxamine-a new serotonin re-uptake inhibitor: first clinical and psychometric experiences in depressed patients

² DU 23000 - the designation used prior to the assignment of the generic name fluvoxamine - was being tested for depression as far back as 1977. Fevarin was released in Switzerland in 1984, although it wasn't approved in the US until 1993.

³ Which seems to be a common trait with sigma-1 agonists.

⁴ Paxil CR has a half-life of 15-20 hours, while the immediate-release form has a half-life of 21 hours.

Date created 17 Mar 2011 - 12:20 Page Creator: JerodPoore Last edited by:

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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 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 the forerunner to 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]