Steroid side effects to be wary of with IgG4-RD

And I think most patients that have experienced steroids have a similar love-hate, maybe even more on the hate side.

They’re generally a pretty toxic medication in terms of driving side effects and the laundry list of symptoms and side effects, adverse effects or reactions, with steroids that are listed in association with them.

They tend to be a bit more of a matter of dose and time that someone’s on it until you see these, rather than, you know, this happens to under 1% of patients. Like most medications have these rare, occasional things that you don’t end up seeing that often or ever.

Especially with the shorter courses, you know, the 2 to 3-month courses we commonly use to treat IgG4-related disease.

The most salient things that I look for and most frequently encounter relate to impaired sleep. You know, this could simply take the form of insomnia, hard to fall asleep at night, or waking up early throughout the night.

And that often kind of spills into emotional regulation and turbulence. You know, feeling grumpy, feeling more angry, sometimes feeling more depressed, sometimes feeling more anxious. That’s not always related, just impaired sleep. Prednisone and steroids can just have these effects on emotions separately.

And then a third one is is weight gain. You know. And that generally is linked to partly to some water or fluid retention while on steroids. But the other part is that steroids really drive appetite.

So those are kind of three things. And the appetite and the weight gain, you know, it’s not generally a large amount of weight. But you know, we all know that it’s difficult to lose weight for most people. So any gaining of weight sometimes tends to be, you know, a new permanent state where it’s hard to lose what you’ve gained. So it’s really important to avoid that.

So those are kind of my big three categories, is kind of sleep, emotional state/anxiety and weight/appetite.