Side effects can develop even if you’ve been taking a pill for a long time

Acolleague in California developed a huge welt that itched terribly; she ended up learning she had developed an allergic reaction to the low-dose aspirin she took for cancer prevention.

An author in Upstate New York thought her rosacea made her skin flaky, but it was actually the cream she used to treat her rosacea that was causing the flakiness, according to washingtonpost.com.

A friend in my town thought his achy forearms resulted from his activities as a chiropractor and an avid golfer, but the achiness turned out to be a potentially serious side effect of the statin he was taking.

You may presume that a new symptom signals an illness or is an inconvenient consequence of aging, when in fact it may be a side effect of a medication you’re taking.

Gary Leroy, a family physician at East Dayton Health Center in Ohio, said, “New side effects can turn up even in medications you’ve been taking for a long time.

“Drug effects and their side effects can change over time. A tolerance or an intolerance can develop. Side effects can crop up well into a course of treatment.”

Leroy related a story of a patient who had been on an anti-seizure medication for a year and then developed a rash.

He said, “It’s a common side effect of the drug, but [it] was new to this patient.”

Leroy said he doesn’t know why the reaction started when it did, but he had a fix: He changed the medication.

All medicines have side effects, and lists of them are fairly easy to find. You can call your doctor or your pharmacy, read package inserts or look up information on websites such as Drugs.com and Rxlist.com.

Derjung Tarn, a family physician and health service researcher at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said, “A lot of nonspecific symptoms, such as headache, indigestion, nausea and dizziness, show up on these lists.”

That’s because these symptoms are

“It made a 180-degree difference in her life.”

Internist Cynthia Smith, vice president of clinical programs for the American College of Physicians, recommended keeping a diary of your medication.

“Stop taking that drug for two to three days and see what happens. Then start the drug again and see what happens.

“Sometimes changing to a different formulation of the same drug can ease a side effect, as from a generic drug to a brand-name pill. It’s possible the problem is a bonding agent in the pill.”

Do you have to go to a doctor to try this? Leroy said that depends on the medication.

If the drug label says something like ‘do not stop taking’, then don’t; instead, tell your doctor about your symptoms.

But if the label says, ‘Take as needed’, it’s relatively safe to stop. In such a case, Leroy said, “you can experiment on your own”.

Smith added, “In general, doctors should do medication reviews with their patients on a regular basis.”

And all the doctors I spoke to said they review meds whenever one of their patients has been to a specialist or has been hospitalized, two situations that may result in new medication regimes.

Medication reviews are particularly important in older adults, as part of what Tarn and Smith refer to as ‘deprescribing’.

This is partly because older adults tend to take more medications, and with each new drug there’s added risk for interactions. But it’s also because some nonspecific side effects can be too easily dismissed as normal aging when they’re not.

Communication about side effects is tricky.

Tarn said, “Each medication has a gigantic number of potential side effects. Obviously, a doctor can’t go over all of them.”

Usually doctors review the most common ones and the ones that pose the greatest risk of dangerous reactions.