Cananyone give me a complete overview of the ADD drug Adderol?

Answer 1

What is Adderall / Adderall XR?: Adderall is a stimulant specifically a cocktail of amphetamine salts.

Other Forms: Extended Release (XR)

What are the FDA Approved Uses of Adderall / Aderall XR:

Adderall was approved in February 1996 to treat Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.

Immediate-release Adderall is also approved for narcolepsy and exogenous obesity.

Adderall XR was approved in August of 2004 to treat ADHD in adults.

Off-Label Uses of Adderall: Depression. Probably others, stay tuned for studies and more potential off-label uses.

Adderall's pros and cons:

Pros: A tried and true way to treat ADD/ADHD and narcolepsy.
Like most amphetamines it doesn't have much in the way of side effects, fewer than the methylphenidates (Ritalin, Focalin, Concerta).



Cons: Those triplicate prescriptions are a pain in the *** to deal with. If you have any history of drug abuse, the odds are you'll never get an Adderall prescription no matter how much you've cleaned up your act and how helpful it will be to you.
Because it's an amphetamine it might be a little too much fun to use for some people.

Adderall's Typical Side Effects: The usual for stimulants - headache, nausea, dry mouth, sweating, insomnia, constipation, weight loss, heart palpitations, raised blood pressure, dizziness, horniness. Generally everything clears up up after a couple weeks except the constipation, weight loss, increased blood pressure and increased libido. So unless you have blood pressure issues and/or real problems with being too thin and/or too horny already I'm sure you can live with the typical side effects.

For tips on how to cope with these side effects, please see our side effects page.
These aren't all the side effects possible, just the most popular ones.



Adderall's Not So Common Side Effects: Triggering a manic reaction. More often than not this happens when someone is misdiagnosed as only having ADD/ADHD when they are also bipolar. Although you won't find "manic reaction" as a side effect anywhere in the PI sheet, you'll find every symptom of mania listed instead. This is a great CYA (Cover Your ***) move by Shire for the doctors prescribing it. Hey, it doesn't trigger mania, it just causes a bunch of symptoms that are like mania! I had one person write me about her bipolar disorder that was in complete remission for 14 years getting completely hosed by an Adderall prescription from a doctor who must have been convinced she only had ADD/ADHD. Other not-so-common side effects are tics, twitches and exacerbation or unmasking of Tourette's or similar syndromes, depression and screwing with your menstrual cycle.
These may or may not happen to you don't, so don't be surprised one way or the other.

Adderall's Freaky Rare Side Effects: Amphetamines don't have much in the way of freaky rare side effects. I may dig up something on PubMed later. The closest thing I can find is the combination of increased libido and impotence.
You aren't going to get these. I promise.

Adderall's Suicide Risk: All psychiatric and neurological meds have a potential suicide risk. I'll get back to you on the specifics with Adderall.

Interesting Stuff Your Doctor Probably Won't Tell You: Since ADD/ADHD is pretty much part of being bipolar, in some cases there really isn't anything wrong in taking Adderall if you're bipolar and taking a good mood stabilizer of some kind. The problem is if you're taking lithium don't expect to lose any weight. Or stay awake for that matter. In fact, Adderall may not work at all when combined with lithium. So if lithium is the mood stabilizer that works for you, you're stuck with your ADD/ADHD symptoms if Strattera (atomoxetine) and/or Provigil (modafinil) didn't cut it for you.

Mixing booze and Adderall, or any stimulant, is a really bad idea. Not only do you increase the chances of having a seizure of some kind (even if you've never had one before), but you just don't feel quite so drunk. So you have another. And another. And another. Until you're a lot thinker than you're drunk, and still insist on driving home, what do you mean it's not your car?

Your doctor, or at least your pharmacist should tell you not to wash down your Adderall with orange juice or any other fruit juices. Those severely lower the absorption of amphetamines. You can drink fruit juice at other times of the day, just not around when you're taking your speed.

Adderall's Dosage and How to Take Adderall: With all stimulants the drug companies and I are in full agreement - start at the lowest possible dosage and see what works! Here it is, right in the PI sheet, "Regardless of indication, amphetamines should be administered at the lowest effective dosage and dosage should be individually adjusted. Late evening doses should be avoided because of the resulting insomnia." At least that is how it used to read. Now that has been watered down a bit.

Adderall was originally approved for childhood ADD/ADHD and all the guidelines were just for kids, so they would start you out at 5mg once or twice a day. With the XR version that would be one 10mg capsule a day. And I'm really down with that method. Now the PI sheet has adults starting at 20mg a day no matter what. You know, they make 10mg capsules and everything costs the same, so why not start at 10mg a day and see how that goes at first? It's easier to deal with having to take more Adderall if it's not working well enough than to deal with the side effects of having had too much to start with. The maximum dosage for an adult is 60mg a day. For kids it's 30mg a day.

For narcolepsy - as above. Start with the lowest dosage possible. By 60mg a day it'll either work or it won't or the side effects will suck too much.

For depression - using amphetamines is pretty radical, but not unheard of. They are sometimes the only thing that will work. Good luck in finding a doctor who will actually work with you along these lines if you need to go this route. Again you should start at the lowest possible dosage. I don't have a clue if the maximum dosage is lower than 60mg a day or not.

How Long Adderall Takes to Work: You should start feeling results within hours of taking your first dose. Now you might not get over your ADD/ADHD or narcolepsy symptoms immediately, but you'll certainly feel something. This is all part of the art of psychopharmacology combined with whatever therapy you're getting and coping skills you're learning. It'll all be a matter of finding the right dosage and learning to work with this med. Presuming it's the right med for you in the first place.

How to Stop Taking Adderall: Your doctor should be recommending that you reduce your dosage by 10-20mg a day every three days if you need to discontinue it, if not more slowly than that. For more information, please see the page on how to safely stop taking these crazy meds. You shouldn't be tapering off any faster than that unless it's an emergency.

So if you're at 60mg a day you take 50mg a day for three days, then 40mg a day for the next three days and so forth until done.
If you've worked your way up to a particular dosage, it's usually best to spend this many days at the next lowest dosage before going down the next lowest dosage before that and so forth. This is the least sucky way to avoid problems when stopping any psychiatric medication. Presuming you have the option of slowly tapering off them.

Average Time to Clear Out of Your System: Three days to get clean.


ADD Medications / CNS Stimulants.












Medications discussed on this site include:

Adderall

Desoxyn (methamphetamine)

Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine sulfate)

Focalin (dexmethylphenidate hydrochloride)

Ritalin / Concerta (methylphenidate hydrochloride)

Cylert (pemoline) (Brand being discontinued, generic still available for now)

And the non-stimulant Strattera (atomoxetine HCl), which is also covered in the section on SNRIs.

While this site is primarily for adults, the ADD/ADHD market is primarily for kids. Although the advertising blitz for adult ADD/ADHD is now in full force, led by the two meds approved for adult use: Strattera and Adderall. There are plenty of adults in the ADD/ADHD spectrum, including the vast majority of people in the bipolar spectrum. That's right, the latest research has shown that people in the bipolar spectrum have less dense prefrontal cortices than the non-bipolar, and that's going to give you ADD symptoms.

We are a bit concerned about the aggressiveness of the marketing of ADD meds towards parents of kids who may or may not need meds. Now you people with kids who obviously express the hyperactive part of ADHD who have tried everything else, we're not telling you to once again question your decision about meds. Kids who are really hyperactive as part of ADHD probably need meds, and just like any other psychiatric disorder it's merely a question of finding the right medication or cocktail of medications. What bugs us is the marketing of drugs as the solution for children not paying attention to boring, irrelevant school that competes with exciting TV and video games. Are children being medicated unnecessarily? Maybe. But there are plenty of kids who are not hyperactive who certainly need drugs. It's tough to figure it out.

ADD medications are all stimulants of a sort, even Strattera. Although sold as the only non-stimulant ADD med currently on the market, Strattera does have a stimulating effect for some people. It sure as hell woke me up in the morning, and I'm not the only one reporting that.

Now if you have ADD/ADHD, these stimulants tend to calm you down and help to focus your attention, whereas if someone without ADD takes a recreational stimulant they're physically and mentally jumping all over the place. This is not a paradoxical reaction as seen in people with bipolar disorder. The ADD/ADHD brain has areas of under-activity primarily in the prefrontal cortices. Anyway, the lack of activity in the prefrontal cortices is the reason why our train of thought is always jumping tracks, if not crashing outright. Nature abhors a vacuum, right? So the brain makes up for that under-activity with extra activity elsewhere, thus the hyperactivity part of ADHD. The ADD meds go right to the prefrontal cortices and generally boost the activity everywhere, but mainly, when they work correctly, where there's not enough activity. Thus activity in the brain is smoothed out and regulated and there's no need to be hyperactive in one place because you're not under-active anywhere else. And with normal brain activity you can keep a train of thought going.

To use a somewhat flawed analogy of a car with a misfiring cylinder, the one or two cylinders that aren't firing correctly are the under-active parts of the brain, while the ones causing the annoying backfires, knocks and bangs are the hyperactive parts of the brain. The ADD meds smooth out the activity of your brain so everything runs at the same level of activity. The trick is just making sure you're not revving too fast all the time.

To help you decide if it's bad enough to require an ADD-med, you should be seeing a therapist or counselor and you should belong to a support group. A psychiatrist is basically going to figure out the right meds for you and that's going to be about it. Sometimes they'll do counseling, but often not. For more information on, and reasons why you should be seeing a talk therapist/counselor and belong to a support group, take a look at my page on support groups. Both will help you determine if you really do need meds. And if you do, the services of both therapist and support group are vital to complete what the meds do, because meds alone are not going to fix your problems! You're going to have to learn coping skills no matter what. So everything that all the people who try the non-med way to deal with ADD - the people who take meds need to be doing that stuff as well. You can't be lazy and expect the meds to do it all for you.

The effects in common to the ADD meds:

Because these are stimulants, they all have a common side effect that is just the thing everyone all the other meds is looking for - weight loss. As such they are not for people who have any sort of eating disorder. They also tend to raise your blood pressure and mess with your heart rhythms one way or another. So if you have any history of cardiac weirdness, it's time for a long talk with your psychiatrist and whoever is looking out for your heart before taking any of these medications.

The sleep thing is weird, while insomnia or just a general need for less sleep is common, yet with some forms of ADD/ADHD some of the speedier ones like Desoxyn, Adderall and especially Dexedrine can actually help people sleep better. Again this is not an example of the paradoxical effect but just a smoothing out of brain activity, I just wish I knew what the deal was with Dexedrine and sleep. I keep getting and reading more reports (you know, anecdotal evidence) of people getting really sleeping on Dexedrine.

They interact with other drugs (especially MAOIs (which interactive with everything on the planet), other antidepressants and anticonvulsants) and some foods. You absolutely cannot wash these meds down with orange juice or other citrus products, else you're wasting your money. It's in some of the older PI sheets for these meds. But not some of the newer ones. Conspiracy by the drug companies? Maybe they were just happier that some kids weren't bouncing off of the ceiling after breakfast.

Anyway, the short reason is here. A longer, and somewhat kinkier answer is here. No OJ. For the same reason no meds for tummy troubles (indigestion, diarrhea, whatever). You've got to have perfectly balanced pH levels in your stomach. The newer flavor of Adderall XR may not be so touchy about this, with it's high-tech coating. The same goes for Concerta. And Strattera doesn't give a rat's *** one way or the other, as it's not technically a stimulant. But all the others - wash them down with water on an either an empty stomach or the blandest food you can eat.

Plus there's aggravation of anxiety and nervousness, tics and tremors (including "unmasking," to use the term of art, of Tourette's syndrome), an increased chance of seizures for those of us in the epilepsy spectrum, that pesky cottonmouth, increased sweating; and the usually transitory stuff of headaches, dizziness and tummy troubles that will accompany each introduction to a new med or increase in dosage.

Oh, and they're addictive and can be abused. And once you get into abuse, or just having too high of a dosage under doctor's orders, you might find yourself in the realm of paranoia, hallucinations and general psychotic behavior. Some of them require a triplicate prescription and Desoxyn in particular is a real pain in the *** to have filled. The growth and weight of kids always has to be monitored.

Because of FDA scheduling you can't buy most of these meds from an overseas pharmacy. Even buying them from a domestic Internet pharmacy can be tricky sometimes and I wouldn't trust buying any CNS stimulant through the mail. If it takes a triplicate prescription, you really should to go someone in person to buy your meds and that's all there is to it.

Because it is possible to misdiagnose bipolar as ADD/ADHD, or vice versa, watch out for mood swings and really nasty mania reactions like rages or their feeling just too good and doing something patently crazy. We always recommend if there is a known or suspected bipolar condition, or even known clinical depression, that all credit cards and firearms be put in the hands of a trusted friend or relative prior to taking any of the stimulant-based ADD medications for the first time, and that that friend or relative have bail money handy. You don't want to find out if you're bipolar the hard way. And if you are bipolar, you had better have a damn good reason for taking these medications.

Otherwise, stimulants don't tend to have a lot of side effects. Well, the non-methylphenidate class. I.e. everything except Ritalin / Concerta and Focalin. That crap I'm not too fond of. Everything else - they're basically a safe class of medication for adults. As usual I'm clueless about kids, so I can't really tell you one way or the other. But for adults, as long as you're not prone to abusing stuff. I.e. you don't have a history of partying too much and/or too often and/or OCD tendencies, then the amphetamine class of stimulant can be a useful and relatively safe class of meds for a variety of applications.

Answer 2

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Cananyone give me a complete overview of the ADD drug Adderol?

Answer 3

I would be anybody's friend, I don't presume to judge people by what they do and what they don't put into their systems. Would I encourage others? Depends on who they were and what drug we're talking about. For example, although it's not for everybody, you only live once and not to have experienced mind alteration with something like mescaline or peyote is too bad, because something like that can show you there is more to existence than the nuts-and-bolts of reproducing, raising kids, and going to work every day. Just one example. Do I do drugs? Not right now, no. Have I ever done drugs? Hahahahahahahahahaha