Author: John Carter

Why Does Methadone Make You Gain Weight? How to Take Care of Your Body Methadone dot org NAMA Recovery

Weight gain can be directly linked to the use of methadone, dietary habits, or other factors related to the treatment or recovery process. Since methadone addiction causes weight loss, this can also serve as an indicator or signal that additional help is needed. In addition to the weight loss, there is also the severity of the symptom to keep in mind. In other words, the severity of the weight loss serves as an indicator of how severe the addiction to the methadone has become. Deaths due to too-rapid titration, drug interactions, or cardiac and respiratory side effects have occurred with methadone use for opioid dependence.

Patient resources

If you’re worried that taking methadone may affect your weight, let our medical staff know. By acknowledging your full medical history, we can help you make lifestyle and treatment changes to achieve better overall health. All of the side effects serve as helpful signals for people who care about the addict.

Why Does Methadone Make You Gain Weight?

To protect your teeth while using methadone or any other medication, you need to observe a basic dental hygiene routine. Visit your dentist two times a year to get your teeth examined and cleaned and reduce the amount of sugary foods you consume daily. You should also drink more water to keep your mouth moist while taking Methadone. Addiction Resource aims to provide only the most current, accurate information in regards to addiction and addiction treatment, which means we only reference the most credible sources available.

Methadone Side Effects

If you’re considering methadone maintenance or need help recovering from opioid addiction, know HCRC can help. Find a HCRC clinic near you or contact us online to learn more about how methadone affects metabolism. The goal of the treatment is to stabilize the person so that they are no longer at risk of relapsing into their former addictive behaviors. Methadone is effective at stabilizing heroine, morphine and codeine addicts, which gives them a fighting chance to recover.

Researchers are confident stating that the brain is re-wired during the development of a chemical addiction. This happens because the brain has a natural tendency to crave certain kinds of rewards, and the substance effectively replaces this natural urge. If the methadone replaces the opiates that the addict is craving, the withdrawal from the opiates can trigger an increase in desire for food. If the person becomes addicted to the methadone directly, the displacement effect occurs in a similar manner, but the person will stop craving food, sex, exercise and other rewards.

Myth #6: It’s Difficult to Stop Using Methadone

The trick is to remember that methadone is a replacement for another drug. Therefore, weight problems are caused by the relationship between the addict and the primary substance. The nature of this relationship determines whether the patient will gain or lose weight. Addiction is not always straight-forward because of the way the human brain is wired to perceive rewards and to experience pleasure. The addiction will take on certain characteristics based on the perception of rewards. In the case of weight gain or loss, the issue is whether the brain perceives the methadone as the primary source of reward or if it is still craving the primary substance, like an opioid drug.

Lifestyle Factors

  1. If you still have doubts regarding the question “Does methadone cause weight gain?
  2. If the methadone replaces the opiates that the addict is craving, the withdrawal from the opiates can trigger an increase in desire for food.
  3. Participants received either 500 mgmetformin twice daily or placebo for 24 weeks; all participants received verbaladvice for dietary modifications and exercise.
  4. Both trials compared lifestyle interventions totreatment as usual (TAU).

This is why so many addicts will lose their desire for things that they used to enjoy. Even simple pleasures like sex or eating delicious food can mysteriously disappear during an addiction to an opioid. This is also the case with methadone addiction, but the confusing part is that it can cause either weight gain or loss.

More on Substance Abuse and Addiction

According to scientific research, BMI (body mass index) is indeed increasing over time, and it is independent of methadone dosage and its level in the blood. Does it mean that methadone is the medications that cause weight gain? But it’s important to understand that the main reason for putting in extra kilos is the normalizing of the patient’s metabolic processes in the body.

Dry mouth, insomnia, excessive perspiration, constipation, loss of energy and chills are just a few of the symptoms. In addition, there are some patients who show no side effects at all from using methadone to treat their addiction to opiates. The current literature contains an array of investigations that seek tomitigate weight gain secondary to psychotropic medication. However, there arefew RCTs that examine the efficacy of proposed weight gain managementstrategies. The remaining three singular trials exploredsibutramine, zonisamide, and ranitidine, respectively.

If you’re pregnant and have a heroin or pain pill addiction, it’s especially important to get treatment to keep yourself and your baby safe. But most of them have fewer health problems than infants whose mothers used heroin or other opioids. When it came to the United States, doctors used it to treat people with extreme pain. Today, you might also get it as part of a treatment program for an addiction to heroin or narcotic painkillers.

In cases of long-term treatment, patients can also be faced with edema of the limbs. Research shows that all symptoms resolve when methadone is discontinued. At HCRC, we want to help you take care of every aspect of your health while in MAT at one of our facilities.