Stopping some medications abruptly — like beta blockers, benzodiazepines, and antidepressants — can lead to withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal from certain medications can cause serious side effects. The risk is typically greater if you've been on the medication for a long time or your dose is high.
Do not stop taking a beta blocker suddenly without consulting your doctor. This is important because when you take a beta blocker regularly, your body becomes used to it. Stopping it suddenly could cause problems such as palpitations, a recurrence of angina pain or a rise in blood pressure.
You might face serious complications.
Even OTC drugs can be dangerous to skip. If your doctor told you to take aspirin every day after a heart attack or a stroke, quitting may make your condition “rebound” and cause another heart attack.
Your doctor will let you know whether or not it's safe to discontinue your medicine. Stopping suddenly can have its own side effects, and it's important for you to make the decision fully informed about what the disease, untreated, can do to your body over the long-term.
Your healthcare provider may decide to lower your dose — or stop your medication completely — if your blood pressure has been well-controlled for some time, typically after at least 1 year.
Stopping suddenly may cause your chest pain or high blood pressure to come back or get worse.
It is safest to come off slowly and gradually.
The longer you have been taking a drug for, the longer it is likely to take you to safely come off it. Avoid stopping suddenly, if possible. If you come off too quickly you are much more likely to have a relapse of your psychotic symptoms.
Always talk to your doctor before discontinuing medication, including prescription medicines and over-the-counter products. Ask your doctor if it is safe to stop taking a particular drug when you feel better. If it is not safe to stop suddenly, make sure you understand how to gradually reduce the medication safely.
Heart conditions
They may also cause fewer side effects than non-selective beta blockers for some people (and more on that later). For heart failure, research studies show that three beta blockers are considered first-choice options: carvedilol, metoprolol succinate (the long-acting form of metoprolol), and bisoprolol.
After a six-year follow-up, the results showed that those who took their medications at night had better controlled blood pressure and a 45 percent decreased risk of death or illness due to heart-related problems.
A beta-blocker overdose can be very dangerous. It can cause death. If the person's heart rate and blood pressure can be corrected, survival is likely. Survival depends on how much and what type of this medicine the person took and how quickly they receive treatment.
Always check with your healthcare provider before stopping blood pressure medication. Quitting abruptly may cause rebound hypertension and serious health risks including: Artery damage. Enlarged heart.
When diuretics are withdrawn the patient develops rebound retention of sodium and water and oedema, which convinces the doctor that the diuretics are necessary, and the patient is then committed to a lifetime exposure to diuretics. 2 Some patients with heart failure do need to continue with diuretic treatment.
Propranolol may cause heart failure in some patients. Check with your doctor right away if you are having chest pain or discomfort, dilated neck veins, extreme fatigue, irregular breathing, an irregular heartbeat, swelling of the face, fingers, feet, or lower legs, or weight gain.
Stopping the use of olanzapine
If you stop taking the antipsychotic all at once, the balance starts to change again. You could get your old symptoms back. Stopping this medicine quickly, or reducing the dose too much at once, may cause your old symptoms to come back, or cause you some withdrawal effects.
Clozapine discontinuation can precipitate the sudden emergence of psychotic symptoms that have been termed 'withdrawal-associated psychosis' or 'supersensitivity psychosis'.
Antipsychotics can cause the very symptoms they relieve, including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, poorer cognition, agitation, mania, insomnia, and abnormal movements.
Treating essential hypertension. The first choice is usually a thiazide diuretic.
Talk to your doctor if you want to stop taking amlodipine. Stopping may cause your blood pressure to rise, and this may increase your risk of heart attack and stroke.
To make sure it's safe for you, tell your doctor if you: have ever had an allergic reaction to amlodipine or any other medicine. have liver or kidney disease. have heart failure or you have recently had a heart attack.
The four best types of blood pressure drugs that are considered the first choices to lower blood pressure include thiazide diuretics, ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), and calcium channel blockers.
Don't change or stop taking your medication without first talking to your care provider. If it's not clear what's causing low blood pressure or no treatment exists, the goal is to raise blood pressure and reduce symptoms.
Safe medications to use include methyldopa and potentially some diuretics and beta-blockers, including labetalol.