Hello, I have been reading here how many people had a negative reaction to some thyroxine brands, i.e. Teva and how after switching to another brand they felt much better.
So wanted to ask - which brand of T4 works best for you?
I have added Teva 12.5 mcg to my current thyroxine (different brand) and have so much anxiety after taking it, though it does go away after about 30 minutes.
Teva and Aristo work best for me (lactose) I think Teva is slightly stronger but I have no evidence of that yet.
Accord made me quite I’ll within hours (lactose)
🌱🦋🌱
Is Aristo lactose free?
Aristo is lactose-free.
helvella's medicines document can be found here:
helvella - Thyroid Hormone Medicines
helvella has created, and tries to maintain, a document containing details of all thyroid hormone medicines in the UK and, in less detail, many others around the world.
This link takes you to a page which has direct links to the document from Dropbox and Google Drive, and QR codes to make it easy to access from phones.
Hi there, well I can't take Teva, had me bed bound, became very ill on that brand. Best brands for me are Mercury Pharma or Accord.
Do you mind sharing your symptoms please? And how soon did they go after you switched to another brand?
Hi there, I took Teva for about 6 weeks I think. I was so exhausted I felt like I wasn't taking any Levothyroxine at all. Had stomach problems and awful joint pains. I was so tired I couldn't get out of bed and if I did manage to get up then I lay on the sofa all day. It only took a few days on a different brand for me to start feeling better but a few weeks for me to be back to where I was before the Teva. I actually filled out a yellow card and advised the pharmacy I use that I couldn't have that brand again.
Gosh, what a difference with the change of brand! Thank you for sharing!
if i'm feeling pretty good ie. " ooh , i've still got the car, where shall i go next? , i know ,that nice garden centre..."
on eg. accord / mercury/ wockhardt ,,......
and i am given Teva for the next prescription .. then after about 10 days.. i feel like..
" urgh ....can i go home and lie down now "
It seems that so many people share their reaction to Teva. I'm glad you know what works for you!
bear in mind ~ some people actively prefer Teva /find it is the only one they can tolerate, and feel rubbish on the 'others'
No problems at all. Good Luck and good health to you.
That is exactly how i was the day after the vax in May 2021 been like it since. Teva last year didn't agree as it contains mannitol so switched to Wockhardt or Mercury.
I had no trouble with after effects of the vaccinations, I think I felt ropey after flu vax? Teva is the devils work to me 😷
Glad you are okay
Which is your other brand
Just cut original brand tablet to get extra 12.5mcg
Does cutting a tablet work? I read that the content is not spread evenly in tablets themselves, so the cut dose would not be accurate?
The view of the UK's MHRA is that we should not split tablets in order to divide doses.
However, at least some makes include specific instructions for splitting when they are supplied to other countries. One such is Aristo.
Either the MHRA is particularly strict, or they impose a blanket policy.
Further, even if the dose divided something like 60:40, it should matter much. So long as you split a tablet and take one part today, the other part tomorrow. (Or something like that.) Not doing a bulk splitting session!
The critical issue then becomes the losses due to crumbs flying off and not being collected.
I'm sure some tablets are much more even than others.
it wont be "100% accurate" no ... but since GP's routinely prescribe 'alternate daily dosing' of eg 100mcg / 125mcg/ 100mcg / 125mcg to get an effective daily dose of 112.5mcg/ daily .
.... then getting a slightly inaccurate split (from one tablet) of eg 15 mcg one day / 10mcg the next .. is still much more 'even' than taking 100mcg one day / 125mcg the next.
Some of us feel perfectly fine taking alternate doses of 100/ 125 .but some can tell the difference each day and find it a bit unsettling .. so we prefer to get more or less the same dose each day . (or as close as reasonably possible)
if you were to split a whole months worth of 25's and put all the halves in a bottle, then yes that could lead to problems , because you might end up taking a whole week of the 'smaller' halves ( or the halves with 'less' in)... which would lead to being slightly under dosed for one week and slightly overdosed for the next...
But splitting one 25mcg tablet at a time and taking 'the other half' the next day is not a problem . ( you still get the full 25mcg over two days.. unless you dropped some of it it on the floor lol )
mop up any crumbs with damp finger so you don’t miss any
Hardly anyone ever gets prescribed 12.5mcg tablets
Personally I have been taking 112.5mcg 3-4 years and always cut my Mercury Pharma tablets. Get weekly pill dispenser for storing tablets
Also price to NHS is much more for 12.5mcg tablets
25mcg levothyroxine x 28 tablets is 90p per packet
12.5mcg x 28 tablets is £12.49
Teva is only brand available so they can name their price
Did you see post today re Teva 12.5mcg recall
healthunlocked.com/thyroidu...
Similarly price of T3
Hundreds of members get prescribed 20mcg liothyronine (T3) tablets and cut into 1/4’s to get 5mcg doses (taking 5mcg 2 or 3 times a day)
20mcg cheaper at £51.54 per 28 tablets
Whereas 5mcg are £99.47 per 28 tablets
or £55 per 28 x 5mcg capsules
That’s criminal! They shouldn’t be allowed to price gouge like that.
I don't do lactose in tablets and when this became an issue for me there were no lactose free Levo tablets available so I am now on liquid Levo and lactose free Thybon-Henning T3 which both suit me well.
What do you need to do to get a liquid form please?
That might depend which area you are in and how your local CCG have coded it. I just checked and in my area a consultant would have to initiate the prescription and then GP agree to take it over. You might be lucky and GP prescribe it but it costs several hundred pounds a bottle as opposed to pennies for tablets. I get 3 bottles a prescription! 😜
I didn't do well on Wokhardt. I always have Mercury Pharma now but I think Accord was OK.
Maybe the lactose didn't agree with you - Levothyroxine sodium, lactose, sucrose (fine powder), maize starch, magnesium stearate
Teva upsets me as it contains mannitol. My surgery always put must be Wockhardt and the local pharmacy is so useless or needs to go to specsavers always tries to fob me off with Teva. One assistant ordered in 4 months of Wockhardt but recently went, same old thing and then he came up with Mercury (its only 25mcg) I said as long as it doesnt have mannitol. Reluctantly he opened the packet and it didn't, but did contain lactose so i have to put up with that, don't feel well enough to argue. I am not good with dairy but i figure a tiny bit of it will not hurt. In any case, I am living on antihistimines at the moment that contain lactose with yet another issue. I don't know why Teva have to produce this rubbish and when you compare the size of it with wockhardt and even mercury, it is so much larger and full of junk fillers.
Wockhardt still contain fillers and the dreaded magnesium stearate but must be such a tiny amount:
Levothyroxine sodium, lactose, sucrose (fine powder), maize starch, magnesium stearate
elaine2447, 'I don't know why Teva have to produce this rubbish and when you compare the size of it with wockhardt and even mercury, it is so much larger and full of junk fillers.'
There are plenty of people who do well on Teva levothyroxine. We are all different!
And the tablet size being larger can actually be very helpful for people who need to split their tablets to fine tune their dose.
It is tiny admittedly but generally who would need 12.5mcg?
On its own, 12.5mcg dose is unlikely to be useful. But added to another tablet it allows fine tuning. e.g. 100mcg +12.5mcg instead of alternating 100mcg one day and 125mcg the next.
After the vax which has caused me so many health issues, a minor one was TSH went up to 9, but 25mcg has brought it down to 2.7 which i am happy with. I had a terrible thyroid storm like thing which a private endocrine surgeon said was the pre cursor to hypo with Hashimotos. 13 weeks of hell I will never forget.
When you say thyroid storm, do you mean you went hyper thyroid?
Yes was absolutely awful 13 weeks non stop of tachycardia, insomnia and nausea. The Gp's were totally useless, I even phoned 111 which is unheard of for me as I have little faith in GP's after being diagnosed with anxiety in 1969 which turned out to be brucellosis (four weeks in hospital with 10 x 4 antibiotic injections and then two months off work) . On this occasion which was 7 years ago, I was trying to cope with my dad in a nursing home two hours away by train and deal with no sleep. In desperation I took a blister of 8 xanax and was wonderful, slept for 12 hours solid but unfortunately someone was knocking at the door in the evening and i felt a bit woozy, and tripped on the stairs and hurt my back. I then went down to see a private endocrine surgeon in London about my parathyroid and told him of this awful three months. The first thing he said was we must test your antibodies, turns out I had hundreds of them and he said you have Hashimotos which i had never heard of. Said it was disgusting the way I was left and could have been quite dangerous as I already have a prolapsed mitral valve.
Gosh, sorry to hear about your experience! I am glad to hear you're doing better!
Mital valve prolapse is common with autoimmune thyroid disease (Hashimoto’s)
webmd.com/heart/news/199911...
That's interesting, I was evidently born with it and was picked up by a doctor by accident in Australia in 1985.
I had it in my teens and I thought I had it too. However, recently I saw a cardiologist and he said I don't have it any longer. He also said it can happen with teenagers and then it balances itself and they don't have it any longer. Interesting!
or perhaps it improves when Hashimoto’s is treated
I was diagnosed with MVP at same time as hashimoto’s
No issues with MVP since
Yes, that's a possibility!
Yes, adding to my 75 mcg
elaine2447 just in case you are not aware.. Wockhardt contains lactose, so if you're ok with that you may be ok with the lactose in Mercury.
Yes I know, I posted up the ingredients earlier on which you must have missed Levothyroxine sodium, lactose, sucrose (fine powder), maize starch, magnesium stearate
Ah , i see , my reply has crossed in mid air with your edit .. lol
p.s lot's of people need 12.5mcg doses ., my prescribed dose is 112.5mcg / day .
Actually Teva is the only one that works well for me. When I refilled my ‘scrip last week, the pharmacist gave me a mix of Teva and Accord, where Teva is a small minority of my total dosage. The first morning after starting the mostly-Accord dose, I woke up feeling utterly exhausted— worse than if I’d had no meds at all — and have been suffering a kind of physical anxiety ever since starting the new mix. It’s absolutely horrible! His colleague had previously agreed to give me only Teva, and I’d been doing well for about a year. This time I didn’t check what was in the bag until I got home and thought I’d just try it, as I thought Accord wasn’t the one that had given me problems in the past. Huge mistake!
Please put in a Yellow Card report. Even if you will never again take it. We simply MUST report issues to the MHRA - if we don't, no-one else will do so on our behalves.
This applies to EVERYONE in the UK who thinks they might have a medicine issue. (Other countries have their own systems.)
By the way, what dosage Accord tablets did you have?
Link below to a post which tells you how to do so:
🟨 Making Yellow Card Reports 🟨
molliemdz , It would be much appreciated if you could please write a new post of your own about this bad experience with Accord.
Over the last three months or so, problems with Accord have been mentioned on this forum. Your comment here is fine, but a separate post about it will bring it to the attention of more members, who may also be having problems.
Something is obviously wrong with the Accord formulation, and the best way of sorting this out is to alert members here and the MHRA.
Brand for levothyroxine
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Which T3 brand do you take?
Teva 75 mcg.
