Both me and my girlfriend suffer from allergies. For her, it’s mainly food issues whilst for me it’s hayfever and bug bites.

We’ve been taking loratadine tablets as anti-histamines. Is anyone here clued up about the long-term (e.g. one tablet per day over 6months) effects of taking these?

Cheers,
hr

I’ve been taking one a day for years and am not dead yet…..

Less sneezing?

I take one a day from April to September, don’t seem to have any affect other than I don’t sneeze or wheeze. I use as piriton (not sure of the active ingredient) makes me very very drowsy

Have taken it for those sorts of lengths of time with no ill effects at all

great. Thanks folks!

Anticholinergic drugs (anthistamines) have been linked with increased chances of dementia. How increased this is… is probably not known..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30988643

One a day (sometimes more) for over 15 years.

Thankfully they’re a lot cheaper off the internet!

I had loratadine for 6 or 7 days which made me lethargic, then it landed me in hospital. My heart had sped up to 200bpm and was beating irregularly.
I had a cardioversion in the end which righted my ticker. Frightening to think an over the counter drug could have that effect on me.

You can do it fine, issue is your body will build up a tolerance to it and it won’t work. I had a phase of taking 20mg of cetirizine and Dr said I could do it forever but it will stop working. I recommend just taking it for a few days then stopping.

Piriton has Citrizine Hydrocloride as the active ingredient, I believe. I take Wilco’s own brand analog at £2/30 days, not noticed any effects other than a lack of sneezing and itchy eyes.

Forgive the slight thread hijack but…. has your GF seen a gastroenterologist? My cycling buddy is one and he is unbelievably well clued up on what makes the digestive system tick. He reckons that most of what gets put down as “allergy” is either some intolerance to certain foods caused by some other underlying problem or failure to recover fully from bad gastritis. I would urge her to see someone like him, or she risks falling into the hands of quacks.

mitsumonkey – interesting – when I tried loratadine some years ago and it had me feeling loopy with my heart beating like a f***ed clock.

I take cetirizine, one a day, year in, year out without any issue.

Cranberry it sounds like you were lucky, well luckier than I was anyway!
I was coming home from work every night and collapsing on the sofa and going to sleep, until I got up on the Saturday morning with my heart racing all over the place. The thing that irritated me was the hospital specialists didn’t want to believe that it was the loratadine (even though this possible side effect was listed on the leaflet in the box) and kept asking me if I was taking ‘street’ drugs. Which I wasn’t.
I’m on grazax now which is a 3 year course of immunotherapy. It’s going well so far.

globalti – she hasn’t seen one. The GPs were reluctant to send her to an allergy specialist but she persisted and they gave up. In the end she had blood tests which indicated various allergies to stuff like strawberries, wheat, soya, peanuts, etc. Nothing dramatic but it gives her itchy skin when she eats them. It started when she was 25 and she’s 27 now.

I suspect that visiting a gastroenterologist would require a lot of fuss to be made on her part to the GPs. I’ll pass on your recommendation and see what she says.

We’re based in Helsinki, Finland and the health service here isn’t great. Any chance we could send an email to your friend with a description of the symptoms?