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Quick-dissolve tablets
When placed under your tongue, the tablets dissolve and the medication enters your bloodstream through the membranes in your mouth. These are absorbed more quickly than other forms and don’t require you to swallow a pill. They’re also easily portable.
Tongue strips
These flavored strips dissolve quickly and are easily absorbed. Usually more expensive than traditional forms of medication, they too are easily portable.
Chewables
Flavored tablets break down quickly in your mouth to become a solution that’s absorbed faster in the stomach. They’re a good choice for adults who don’t want to swallow pills and for school-age kids.
Coated tablets
The coating helps tablets go down easier but can delay absorption. For example, enteric-coated aspirin dissolves in the small intestine instead of the stomach, where it could cause irritation. That’s a bonus for sensitive stomachs, especially for people on aspirin therapy for heart health.
Gelcaps or liqui-gels
Soft gelatin capsules typically hold liquid medicine, which may be absorbed more quickly than regular pills. These are easier to swallow than hard pills, but the capsules tend to be bigger.
Patches
These adhesives can be applied to the skin to release fast-acting, continuous medication. Most common for smoking cessation and pain relief, they’re helpful if you don’t want to take medications daily, have trouble swallowing pills, or want quick, site-specific relief.
Other factors, including the way a drug is stored, its inactive ingredients, how long your stomach takes to empty, and how acidic the drug is, affect how quickly and how much of a drug is absorbed.
- A dose of medication will reach a peak, or maximum, level in the blood 30 minutes to 4 or 6 hours after it is taken. The peak time varies for different drugs.
- The time between taking the medication and reaching the peak level depends on the specific medicine and what form it is in, for example a liquid, tablets, capsule or slow-release form.
- In general, liquids are absorbed quickly.
- Medications in slow-release forms are absorbed gradually over hours and produce the steadiest levels in the blood. These slow-release forms can be taken less often, once or twice a day.
- Eating before a dose may also affect how long it takes to reach a peak level.
- A medicine's half-life is the time it takes for its level in the blood to be reduced by one-half.
- The half-life of each seizure medicine depends on how quickly it is broken down and gotten rid of from the body.
- How often a medicine should be taken depends on the drug’s half-life.
- If a medicine has a short half-life, the amount in your blood may quickly become too low to control your seizures. Medicines with short half-lives ideally should be taken several times a day. Then you can take a smaller amount each time and your blood level will stay more stable.
- Medicines with long half-lives have more stable levels over a number of hours. This let’s the medicine be taken less often.
Seizure medicines work best when the amount in your system reaches a steady state or constant amount.
- To keep this steady or constant amount, the medicine needs to be taken on a regular basis. The amount you take in needs to equal the amount your body gets rid of.
- Just because a medicine has reached a steady state doesn’t mean that it will control seizures. Only by taking the medicine for a while (usually a number of months) can you tell if the drug is going to work for you.
- Yes, even when someone has been taking the same medication for a long time the amount in your body will change over the course of the day.
- Missed doses can also be a reason for why medicine levels change.
- Dose-related side effects are more likely to occur at times of the highest (peak) levels and a seizure is more likely to occur at times of the lowest (trough) levels.
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