Suggest Remedy For Excessive Sleep In A Teenager While On Olimelt

Posted on Mon, 12 Oct 2015

Question: My 17 yr old nephew shows symptons of AspergPer's syndrome. He has been taking 5 mg Oliment since nearly 2 years. He tends to sleep for almost 14 hours which results in disturbance of his body clock. He gets anxious and violent due to lack of sleep. he also eats a lot due to the effect of medicine.

Kindly suggest if there is a better alternative.

Answered by Dr. Dr. Ashok Kumar Choudhary (16 minutes later)

Brief Answer:
The medication can be changed

Detailed Answer:
Hello,
Thanks for using Healthcaremagic.

From the available description it appears that your nephew is having side effects due to use of Olanzapine.

The side effects can be tackled in two different ways.
First shifting to weight neutral and sleep neutral medication from Olanzapine. One of such example is Aripiprazole which can be used instead of Olanzapine. Doses are almost similar to olanzapine and 7.5 mg of olanzapine will be equal to 10 mg of aripriprazole.

The second choice is to reduce the dose of olanzapine and increase physical exercise. Although this can be used sometime people develop relapse of symptoms for which olanzapine was used.

Please discuss with your doctor both the options and consider shifting to Aripiprazole in cross titration manner so there is no untoward events.

I hope this helps you.
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Above answer was peer-reviewed by : Dr. Chakravarthy Mazumdar