Your doctor can help you weigh the potential risks and benefits of benzodiazepine use and your pregnancy. Benzodiazepine withdrawal can be managed with a gradual https://ecosoberhouse.com/ dose reduction, which will cause milder symptoms that come and go in waves. Withdrawing from benzodiazepines can be a difficult, even dangerous process.
Protracted Withdrawal Syndrome (PWS)
So, your doctor may recommend a slower taper schedule as a safety precaution. If you take benzodiazepines infrequently, such as once a week or once every few weeks to treat panic attacks, you can take them for a longer period of time. This is because inconsistent use doesn’t pose the same risk of dependence or withdrawal.
How severe are the symptoms of withdrawal?
If you experience unpleasant withdrawal symptoms during your taper, your care team can help you explore options to address those symptoms and get relief. When tapering off benzodiazepines, you’ll always want to work with a trained healthcare professional who can monitor you for side effects and adjust your severe benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome pace accordingly. A therapist or other mental health professional can offer support with navigating these effects and helping improve your overall quality of life during the withdrawal period. The 2022 survey mentioned above also asked respondents to what extent withdrawal symptoms affected their lives.
Long-term symptoms
- Tapering can help take the edge off withdrawal symptoms like tremors and nausea, though it may not prevent withdrawal symptoms entirely.
- If I was withdrawing from benzos you could offer me a gram of heroin or just 20mg of diazepam and I’d take the diazepam every time – I’ve never been so frightened in my life.
- Protracted withdrawal is a long-term withdrawal syndrome that may come and go for several months.
- These ions change the neuron’s electrical charge, so it has to work much harder to activate and send signals.
- His physical examination was consistent with withdrawal including mild tachycardia, resting tremor, and mydriasis.
They also know that the incidence of protracted symptoms in those who have abruptly stopped a benzodiazepine is higher, and those who have undergone a slow taper at the patient’s individual pace is almost certainly very much lower. The severity of withdrawal symptoms varies between people and depends on a variety of factors. It is estimated that percent of patients taking benzodiazepines long-term (past the 2-4 week prescribing guidelines) will experience protracted withdrawal or a “post-withdrawal syndrome”. Clinical trends indicate that the risk for protracted illness is especially high in persons who stop their benzodiazepine abruptly (cold turkey or over-rapid taper), and in those who are poly drugged on multiple centrally active pharmaceuticals. There may be a genetic predisposition or gene expression phenomenon that occurs during the withdrawal syndrome to shift into a protracted withdrawal syndrome and damaged central nervous system.
During the first week, you can also expect physical symptoms like headaches and hand tremors. Any information given on this site should not be substituted for the advice of a healthcare provider who is well-informed about benzodiazepine dependency and withdrawal. Anyone experiencing troubling symptoms from withdrawal, such as suicidal thoughts or tendencies, should seek immediate medical care. Medical detox involves tapering off the benzo drug under the supervision of a doctor.
In addition, buprenorphine therapy was initiated with a starting dose of 4mg. Despite these measures, the patient continued to remain symptomatic with agitation, tremors, and nausea, requiring increasing doses of both benzodiazepines and buprenorphine. He received an additional 12mg of buprenorphine in addition to 45mg of diazepam. A multimodal approach to symptom control was attempted involving olanzapine 10mg, gabapentin 300mg, phenobarbital 260mg, and ondansetron 4mg. An estimated 50-80% of people who have taken benzodiazepines continually for a few weeks or longer will experience withdrawal symptoms when reducing the dose; a smaller percentage will experience severe withdrawal. People taking benzodiazepines regularly long term (longer than 2 to 4 weeks) may have symptoms of withdrawal even when they have not reduced the dose.
One known case of death was that of David Stojcevski, an inmate at the Macomb County Jail 17 days into a 30 day sentence for an unpaid traffic ticket. A 27-year-old male with a history of benzodiazepine and opioid abuse presented to our emergency department with a chief complaint of drug withdrawal. The patient noted significant polysubstance use, including 30mg of oral alprazolam and 10 bags of insufflated fentanyl consumption daily. On arrival, the patient was found to manifest symptoms consistent with a combined opioid and benzodiazepine withdrawal, including palpitations, tremors, agitation, nausea, and diarrhea. His physical examination was consistent with withdrawal including mild tachycardia, resting tremor, and mydriasis.
- By Corinne O’Keefe OsbornCorinne Osborn is an award-winning health and wellness journalist with a background in substance abuse, sexual health, and psychology.
- GABA acts as a sort of speed bump that helps all the other chemical messengers travel through your brain at a reasonable pace.
- From 1996 to 2013, the number of people filling benzodiazepine prescriptions increased by 67%.
- If you stop taking them “cold turkey,” or all at once, you may experience severe, even life threatening, withdrawal symptoms.
Our survey did not ask about these products; however, 90.4% of our respondents reported they definitely or mostly took benzodiazepines as prescribed. Withdrawal from benzodiazepines is an uncomfortable process with the potential to last for several weeks (or longer). While the 2022 survey on benzodiazepine withdrawal adds significantly to clinical understanding of the medical condition and its longer-term effects, it did not include a control group or try to account for a possible nocebo effect, where symptoms are developed precisely because they are expected. Respondents to the survey were also self-selected, meaning their data may not align perfectly with a larger population of all people taking benzodiazepines. Nevertheless, the survey findings support and bolster earlier research on the condition dating from the 1960s and repeated as factors of concern in the 1970s and 1980s.