(Please bear with us, this site is under construction)

Med Release: Sustained, Extended, etc.

The usual disclaimer: What I'm writing below is based only on my knowledge, experience and understanding, and a limited amount of reading. Since I'm not certified medical professional, I cannot guarantee 100% accuracy or comprehensive nature of the information (but can anyone guarantee 100% in life?)

The "release" of a medication, in simple terms, refers to how quickly a drug is processed by our body. The scientific term "bioavailability" and "half-life" are used to describe how much of a medication is processed by our body and how long it takes, and the different points in the digestive system where it is absorbed and processed. The "blood level" of a drug is often the major consideration. Drug coatings are often used to control the release timings of medications. There is a large variation among drugs / categories of drugs. For the most part, medications dissolve and get completely processed by the system under 10 hours and exit the system. (There are, of course, exceptions. Prozac weekly stays in the system almost 7 days).

The main consideration should be how fast the medication starts working. This is one of the major problems for people who take psychiatric drugs, many of which take 4-6 weeks to build up a therapeutic level to fully "work", assuming the medication does work for a person, which is a whole other topic in itself.

Instant/Fast Release:

These tablets or capsules dissolve into our system and blood stream very quickly. Some medications dissolve even before they are swallowed. Medications like Aspirin or Tylenol are dissolve very quickly and are absorbed into the stomach and take about twenty minutes to fully enter the system and the full dose gets released into the blood stream in a very short time, 20 minutes or less.

Sustained Release:

This is a design which allows the medication to be released gradually into the system, so that a small and fixed dosage amoutn of the medication is entering and getting processed by the system during the entire course of the medication staying in the system.

Extended Release:

These medications are designed to dissolve over a long period of time, so that small amounts are processed over a long time. This is what allows a prescription medication to be taken once a day, and stays in the system for a full day or longer. This is also the importance of taking the medication regularly, and about the same time every day. Capsules in general tend to be slower than pills, because of the extra level of coating.

Bioavailability:

Half-Life:

This is a way of measuring how long a medication actually stays in the system, before being discharged into the liver or the kidney. It is the amount of time it takes a medication for the blood level to have only half of the original level it reached when it was first processed.

Note that the half-life and time period of stay in the blood may vary from person to person. There is also the issue of tolerance to the medication, ie. the body may get adjusted to doses of certain medications like Benzodiazapenes (Valium, Xanax, Klonopin etc), and a person may need more dosage to reach the same half-life after a period of time.). So the values of half-life are an average or typical amount.

The discharge from the system does not always mean that there will be no trace of the medication. Blood and urine tests reveal processing by the system, weeks after stopping a drug. Most drugs stay in your bloodstream to a small extent for a month, sometimes upto three months. Traces remain in the hair until all of the original hair is cut, or shaved off.