So you're saying that half of a 50/200 ER is about 60% of a regular (non-cut) 50/200 ER? Is that the half-life of the pill? What parameter is reduced? Is it the length of time the drug is effective? Sorry for the confusion. My amantadine (1/2 tablet twice a day) makes my short-term memory problems worse.

[QUOTE=alreadybutnotyet;1252687]So you're saying that half of a 50/200 ER is about 60% of a regular (non-cut) 50/200 ER? Is that the half-life of the pill? What parameter is reduced? Is it the length of time the drug is effective? Sorry for the confusion. My amantadine (1/2 tablet twice a day) makes my short-term memory problems worse.[/QUOTEt

taking the 2 halves of a 50/200CR has the same affect as taking the whole pill. if you chewed that pill the affect would approximate (2) 25/100. i see you are already taking a CR at night so you could play around with adding CR, subtracting 25/100 during the day.
i'm not a doctor so do this at your own risk or talk to your doctor, best to test on the weekends. i think a lot of md's don't recommend CR during the day for advanced pd'ers since it can be unpredictable and build up later in the day. like i mentioned before, i'll take 100-150mg of 25/100IR(immediate release) in the morning to get a jump start, an hr later 50mg of IR +50/200CR. This might last me 3hrs, i'll follow with 100mg and repeat the pattern just once or twice, i don't want to take more than 3 50/200's during the day.

just got an RX for 25/250 C/L. This gives me more options, split to get 125mg and 62.5mg when i split the 125. it has only 1 score but splits pretty ok into qtrs, pill is blue, the mylan brand. i've tried the 25/250 an hr after eating some protein (no will power) and it kicked in in an hour. fwiw, it's cost to a pharmacy is not much more than 25/100 and even though there is less carbidopa, if your're taking 1000mg combined IR and CR like i am probably doesn't matter. so even if you paid for the rx out of pocket it would be a cheap reserve.

[QUOTE=soccertese;1252749]
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alreadybutnotyet,

It's good to hear that you are finding multi-compartment pill containers to be helpful.

When I started using one, I found that an unexpected benefit was that I more often took the dose as soon as the alarm sounded, rather than putting it off until later. I think this is because taking a dose is much quicker now. That is, to take a dose now, I no longer have to put on my glasses, get out the bottle of pills and the pill cutter, cut a pill into halves (and maybe quarters), and then put away the bottle of pills and the pill cutter. Taking a dose nowadays takes me about one minute!

Jeff

I've come across a paper [1], albeit nearly 10 years old, which covers some of the same ground as my minute-to minute levodopa plasma level graphing tool (see earlier posts in this thread). Mikkko et al. report empirical results of plasma levels during the course of the day for people taking 4 or 5 doses of Stalevo (levodopa, carbidopa, entacapone). Both methods show a saw-tooth pattern, related to the wax and wane of each dose.

For instance, compare their graph, Fig 2, top right, with the graph produced by the tool. (Please note that they use a different scaling factor for the y-axis). The data for this is 4 doses of 100mg Stalevo taken 3.5 hours apart.

Stalevo4doses.png

Why is this important? Being able to visualize what is going on is a step towards controlling what is going on.

Reference:

[1] Mikko Kuoppamäki, Kirsi Korpela, Reijo Marttila, Valtteri Kaasinen, Päivi Hartikainen, et
al.. Comparison of pharmacokinetic profile of levodopa throughout the day between levodopa/carbidopa/entacapone and levodopa/carbidopa when administered four or five times daily. European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, Springer Verlag, 2009, 65 (5), pp.443-455. <10.1007/s00228-
009-0622-y>. <hal-00534945>
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00534945/document

John