My step son Alex has been taking Daytrana steadily for months now. He has varying mood swings due to the medication. Let me digress a bit, Alex is a very picky eater as it is. Daytrana tends to suppress his appetite, since he’s underweight, this is a major concern for us as parents. Pizza, chicken nuggets, cheese (all kinds of it), cheese burgers, french fries, and he’ll occasionally humor me by actually eating what I cook for dinner, breakfast consists of cereal; always. So, the appetite suppressing due to Daytrana is a serious problem.
The happiest medium we have found is half of the patch, this seems to work for Alex. Also making sure he eats more than just cereal in the morning before the Daytrana kicks in. We also try to make sure he gets outside before the “crash” point, because if and and when he does crash, he doesn’t want to do anything, and I mean anything. We usually can tell if the Daytrana is affecting him more so than other days. Adriane and I rely on his lack of communication, total loss of appetite -we can usually coax him into eating something as long as he hasn’t crashed, though we couldn’t at first-, and his absolute desire-less and unwillingness attitude.
Daytrana is a strong stimulant for Alex, so we are looking into some other options for him. The name of the new medication eludes me so please forgive me. I can tell you that it is a non-stimulant and it’s actually ‘new’ to the market. Again I digress, Alex has a hard time swallowing pills. He just won’t; however, he how realizes the long term effects of the Daytrana so he has opted to at least try the new medicine. Hopefully in the near future we’ll have a little less mood, and a lot more progress!
Tags: ADHD, Daytrana, Learning disability