My husband doctor told him he needed to take an "aciphex vacation" one day a week becase of the risk of oseoporosis. I can't find any info to support that theory and he is suffering missing a day. Thank you
Q: Is this true that is causes calcium loss or risk of osteoporosis?
Answers (1)
10/ 7/09 9:13am
Boy this is a multipart question. Re: calcium loss/osteoporosis risk. The problem is that most calcium requires stomach acid to be absorbed into the body. When you decrease the stomach acid longterm, the body absorbs less calcium, and this increases the risk of osteoporosis. I'm in that risk category too: I've been on Prilosec/omprazole for around 10 years. My bone density has decreased, but not into the osteoporosis category yet. However, it was low to begin with. Taking extra calcium has not seemed to help. I have read that calcium citrate does not need the calcium - you might want to ask the pharmacist what calcium is most easily absorbed. I also have rheumatoid arthritis, which on its own increases the risk. So maybe something would work better for your husband than for me.
As far as the aciphex vacation for one day a week, I've never heard of that! unfortunately, all he's going to get on that one day is a rebound effect - MORE ACID THAN USUAL, not just what it used to be. Click to see MedicineNet article on this. It says that the rebound effect can go on for a couple of months! But there is one person on this site who recently wrote about getting through the first 2 weeks off the acid-reducer by using probiotics and licorice. I'm trying that, and it's somewhat helping me reduce so far to every other day. If I get the burning throat I will take Maalox and/or tums and still try to avoid the RX.
I'm currently myself trying to drop back to omeprazole every other day, because I stopped one of my meds (Celebrex) which was making it worse, and my stomach was hurting from too much omeprazole! It would just seem to stop digesting altogether - for hours! It took me a couple of years to realize that not all the pain was the acid - some was a side effect of the med!
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Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to my question! I so appreciate your insight!