Vertigo as side effect from Terazosin

[pvw2]

Has anyone else had vertigo as a side effect from terazosin? This side effect appeared when I increased the dose from 1 mg to 2 mg. I was at 1 mg for over a year.

[House2]

any time your dose is increased or if you restart treatment after you have stopped it, take your first dose at bedtime unless otherwise directed to lessen the risk of injury related to dizziness or fainting. Also during these times, avoid situations where you may be injured if you faint.

[pvw2 in reply to House2]

For me it took three days at 2 mg for the vertigo symptoms to peak and three days not taking terazosin for the vertigo to completely go away. This was not dizziness from lowered blood pressure, which measured normal. This exactly matched eustachian tube vertigo. I did not notice side effects when I had started 1 mg doses.

[JCRO in reply to pvw2]

Terazosin lowers BP as you know.

POTS on standing causes a rapid loss of BP that you might not pick up with a cuff based BPM. BP can return to normal very very quickly. Dizziness then back to normal

I’ve read that POTS can be one of the many symptoms of dysautonomia which can unfortunately be caused by the joy that is PD. Oddly so are heart palpitations. Terazosin I guess could make things worse if the autonomic (sympathetic and para sympathetic) system is playing up. But you probably need the Terazosin for other (urgent) reasons. Tricky spot. One I find myself in. I’m seeing a specialist on dysautonomia in PD later in the month 09/22). Best of luck.

[pvw2 in reply to House2]

By the way are you saying I would reduce and eventually not get the side effects if I gradually replace the 1 mg dose with 2 mg every few days rather than increase all at once?

[MarionP in reply to pvw2]

That's one for your doctor to answer rather than someone who the only thing you know about each other is your fake internet names. Unless you somehow got the stuff off the street.

[pvw2 in reply to MarionP]

I've discussed this with my doctor, but we are lacking in knowledge of actual people who have experienced this. We only have the side effect list, and when we see the side effects list, low blood pressure would seem to be the cause of dizziness rather than vertigo.

[MarionP in reply to pvw2]

I think you have what you need to pursue this, and a definite need to do so.

Individual case response, as your doctor should have advised you and probably did, trumps statistics about groups, which always involves some amount of error, plus necessarily incomplete information and knowledge.

At this point you have only hypotheses to explore and pursue to build up individual case evidence, and until you do, you have nothing.

If I were you I would get going, very soberly and intentionally partnered with the cooperation with the physician which thus preserves and binds the doctor with your interest, which no one here can duplicate, and include a visit to your local emergency/urgent care provider, before you bust your head or suffer a hypotensive stroke.

The time for argument about a particular detail of comparatively minimal aspect in search of narrowing things down absolutely, has passed. Now off you go to get this fixed.

[STEWBABY]

cut back your dosage? Good luck

[MarionP]

Common with terazosin or with interactions of other meds with terazosin, it's a form of postural hypotension, when you stand or exert and for a moment you don't get enough blood to your brain by reason of a temporary drop in blood pressure up there. If you're at risk of falls and falls might be harmful to you, or you have to do things like drive or play in traffic, it's a right-now problem and you need to immediately go back to the 1mg and call your doctor right away.

If it's more frequent, or more constant or lasts longer than it should, you report to your doctor and maybe they adjust the dose or the timing or maybe have another form of the medication to use, or maybe they decide to put you back at the earlier dose and supplement with a second medication that does what you need without adding to the perfusion issue.

[pvw2 in reply to MarionP]

That is what is particularly puzzling with the symptoms I had. Your description is what the doctor and I expected to be the dizziness side effect from terazosin, dizziness from low blood pressure. Those symptoms are different from vertigo, and my blood pressure was not low. Yet, when I stopped taking terazosin, the symptoms went away too fast for vertigo from hitting my head.

[pvw2 in reply to pvw2]

Example of the difference between vertigo and low blood pressure dizziness: when I did the vertigo exercises, sitting on the edge of the bed, rotating laying the side of my head on the bed, sitting up again between rotating to the other side, my head would spin when laying the side of my head on the bed. I wasn't dizzy sitting up. That's the opposite of dizziness from low blood pressure.

[House2]

Perhaps I should have simply stated that I had to discontinue a similar medication (same class of drug) because it exacerbated my postural instability to an intolerable level. I agree with Marion, it is ill advised to seek prescription recommendations from an internet forum.

[pvw2 in reply to House2]

I'm not looking for recommendations. Ultimately the prescription is up to my doctor. The doctor and I are trying to figure out if I had vertigo from falling and hitting my head, or if the vertigo was a side effect from Terazosin, and I fell from the side effect.

[House2 in reply to pvw2]

like I said, I couldn’t tolerate it at all