Like all medicines betahistine can cause side effects, although not everyone gets them. Often side effects improve as your body gets used to the new medicine. What should I do? These are quite common when you first start taking betahistine and often go away with time.
If you take too much
Taking too much betahistine can make you feel sick or sleepy, or give you stomach ache.
Betahistine comes in both a tablet form as well as an oral solution, and is taken orally. It is rapidly and completely absorbed. The mean plasma elimination half-life is 3 to 4 hours, and excretion is virtually complete in the urine within 24 hours.
These symptoms include: feeling dizzy and a spinning sensation (vertigo) ringing in the ears (tinnitus) loss of hearing.
Several clinical trials have demonstrated that betahistine is effective in reducing the frequency and severity of vertigo, and improving vertigo-associated symptoms, including nausea and vomiting [7,9–15].
Do not stop taking this medicine suddenly, or change the dosage, without checking with your doctor. Do not use this medicine to treat any other complaints unless your doctor or pharmacist tells you to. Do not give this medicine to anyone else, even if they have the same condition as you.
Keep taking your tablets until your doctor tells you to stop. Even when you start feeling better, your doctor may want you to carry on taking the tablets for some time to make sure that the medicine has worked completely.
Taking further into account a good and slightly favorable safety profile, there is evidence that the fixed combination of cinnarizine/dimenhydrinate is a potent and even superior alternative to betahistine in the treatment of vertigo related to peripheral vestibular disorders.
Betahistine enters the CNS and improves histaminergic neurotransmission (12). Although several studies have reported subsequent improvements in cognitive function (12–16), they have shown conflicting findings on the effects of betahistine on cognition.
It works by increasing the effect of a natural substance called histamine in your inner ear. Antihistamines work by stopping histamine affecting the cells in your body. They're often used to relieve symptoms of allergies, such as hay fever, hives, conjunctivitis and reactions to insect bites or stings.
If any of these side effects occur you should stop treatment immediately and contact your doctor. Common side effects (at least 1 in 100 and less than 1 in 10 patients): Nausea, indigestion, headaches. Itching, rash, hives, mild gastric complaints such as vomiting, stomach pain and bloating.
Betahistine is an oral histamine analogue which, due to its vasodilatory properties, is used habitually to treat episodic vertigo and other inner ear disorders. 1 Adverse effects include headache, confusion, nausea, dyspepsia, and hypotension.
Anxiety symptoms
The repeated-measures ANOVA showed a significant effect of time (P<0.00001), indicating that both high-dose and low-dose betahistine could significantly reduce the HARS score.
Your doctor may advise you to try betahistine for 6 to 12 months to see if it helps to reduce your symptoms. If it does, it can then be continued.
Be careful driving or operating machinery until you know how Serc affects you. This medicine may cause dizziness, and tiredness in some people. If you have any of these symptoms, do not drive, operate machinery or do anything else that could be dangerous.
Betaserc used in treatment of balance system disorders lessens the insensitivity of vertigo, gait disturbances and nausea/vomiting. It does not affect hearing loss or tinnitus. The first therapeutic goals are achieved (especially in patients under 40 years of age) after 14 days of treatment.
Taking the drug betahistine could reduce the feeling of vertigo, even when the cause hasn't been found. Vertigo is a feeling that the environment is moving around when it is not. It can be caused by problems in the ear or the brain.
Increases in vestibular blood flow and decreases in blood pressure were observed in response to betahistine infusions.
You should not drink alcohol while being treated with this medicine, because there have been reported cases of interaction between this medicine with alcohol. Betahistine should not be taken during pregnancy or breast-feeding unless your doctor has decided that it is necessary.
In vitro, betahistine suppressed CD4(+) T cell differentiation into Th17 cells. These results indicate that betahistine is effective in suppressing both inflammatory and Th17 responses in mouse CIA and that it may have therapeutic value as an adjunct treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.
Whilst histamine has positive inotropic effects on the heart, betahistine is not known to increase cardiac output and its vasodilator effect may produce a small fall in blood pressure in some patients.
Histamine antagonists are one of the most commonly used drugs in improving vertigo symptoms, which sometimes makes a lot of unwanted side effects such as sedative effects in patients and limits their use.
Eye irritation and palpitations were more commonly reported with high dose betahistine than with low dose betahistine and placebo.
The dizziness that accompanies anxiety is often described as a sense of lightheadedness or wooziness. There may be a feeling of motion or spinning inside rather than in the environment. Sometimes there is a sense of swaying even though you are standing still.
One case concerned a male patient of unknown age who experienced weight loss, insomnia, impatience and irritability soon after the start of betahistine therapy.