aching feet
Posted , 12 users are following.
Recently diagnosed with PMR. Wondering if foot pain is common for anyone. Bottoms of my feet feel bruised when I'm not on Prednisone.
0 likes, 14 replies
Posted , 12 users are following.
Recently diagnosed with PMR. Wondering if foot pain is common for anyone. Bottoms of my feet feel bruised when I'm not on Prednisone.
0 likes, 14 replies
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Anhaga braden74
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maid_mariane braden74
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VickieS braden74
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dan38655 braden74
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That occurred after about five months of treatment, or about the time I had tapered to 9mg or so. It lasted 8-10 weeks as I recall, and has not recurred.
I've had many different symptoms that have occurred over the last two years, very odd how they randomly pop up like they do.
These varying symptoms result in my having to constantly re-adjust my dosage in response to whatever specific symptoms become severe enough to cause disability or loss of sleep.
At one time it was the palms of my hands that became painful enough to force increased dosage, that was a couple of months after the soles of my feet had been acting up badly enough to force me to buy bigger shoes and increase my dosage for a while.
I've had thumb joints flare up more than once, have had headaches while sleeping, had a months-long ribcage episode and currently have bursititis to the left-rear hip area. Each of these isolated symptoms caused me to go back to a slightly higher dose for a while.
Perhaps none of those localized flare-ups would have occurred if I had used a higher dosage since being at around 10mg/day, but I would never have known what the dosage requirement was unless I had continued to taper down the dosage. Starting at 15mg/day, I was prescribed a 1mg/month reduction taper, but have had to use higher dosage than prescribed ever since getting below 10mg/day.
And for reference, I was already down to ten stone (140lbs) by the time my treatment began at 15mg/month, so may have needed higher dosing if I weighed more. I am currently using 4mg/day and still weigh about 140#.
diana21296 dan38655
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dan38655 diana21296
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But a larger body needs a higher dosage to get serum levels into the same therapeutic range that would be achieved in a smaller body with a lower dosage.
Fat mass might be excluded from the patient size adjustment as it does not contribute to blood volume, but bigger muscles, organs and circulatory apparatus will need proportionally higher dosage.
diana21296 dan38655
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dan38655 diana21296
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I'm pretty sure that at higher dosage levels that I would have been spared a great deal of discomfort and fatigue. But I still wanted to get below 5mg, and like I mentioned earlier I would never know what my minimum dosage was if I didn't test my response to ever-lower dosage.
In hindsight, it does seem like my prescribed initial 15mg dosage was appropriate to my needs, but my rate of taper itself needed to be tapered as it turns out, heading into the dead-slow range as I dropped below 10mg.
I can say that I never suffered any noticeable side effects from even my initial prescribed dosage of prednisone, and still haven't gained back more than a few of the fifteen pounds that I lost during first three months of pre-treatment pmr.
diana21296 dan38655
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EileenH diana21296
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In GCA there is a recommended dose per kg for pred but only up to a maximum of 60mg, i.e. however heavy you are, 60mg should generally be the top of the range. If, however, there are visual symptoms, then an even higher dose may be used to reduce the risk of loss of vision but the 80 or 100mg dose is only used for a few days until the symptoms are seen to have resolved.
The dose chosen should depend on the symptoms - because the numbers are only a very rough guide as different people produce a different inflammatory response. There is not necessarily a correlation between the severity of the symptoms and level of ESR/CRP - and about a fifth of people, even with quite severe symptoms, never have raised blood markers at all.
Anhaga dan38655
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iellen32 EileenH
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I am grateful to you, Eileen, for the contents of all your posts.
Elijo EileenH
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EileenH braden74
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A lot of people say it feels like walking on sharp pebbles or broken glass. I felt as if my feet were being squashed in desperately tight shoes - and I needed a good size larger than I had ever done before. I threw out a lot of pairs of shoes. Others have commented it feels as if the soles of their feet have been rubbed with sandpaper - that was also a sensation I had if I walked far, especially in sandals without socks on.
Like Vickie, long before anything identifiable as PMR. I had sore toe joints in both big toes so that I wore Birkenstocks all year round as long as it was dry - thick socks!
All these things faded after I eventually was put on to pred and have never returned. My chiropodist has commented on how different my feet are now compared with when I first visited her - in fact, they are so much better I only see her about once a year now.