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imatinib Sandoz Please help!

Hi, 

looking for some help please my husband has been on roller coaster since diagnosis on 15july this year, he has been given imatinib sandoz to take one a day and has since the 18th July this morning he was in tears with bone muscle pain with cramps and spasms I gave him a high strength Vit D and he managed to get about 4 hrs sleep after being up for most of the early morning hours.. we have read lots of threads and advice ( none of which we have had from our doctor or consultant or the haematology nurse specialist) I hate seeing my big strong man really struggle with this our heads are all over the place never mind our emotions... to cap it all I phoned up this morning for advice on anything he could

take

to give him some relief to be told come off the drugs and come into the hospital in 6 days time... we don’t want to give in we just want to be told what can help him get past this hard stage as advised in the pamphlets we received on diagnosis... thanks in advance would just like some input 

Hi Brenda,

This link is the talk from last year's patient day on side effects. Sebastian Francis ( a consultant from Sheffield) talked a lot about the side effects of imatinib. Hope that helps. The bad bone pain I had went down to low levels in 6 weeks, and completely in 3-4 months, but I was never as bad as your husband. I do have a high pain threshold, which may have been a good thing in this case.Keeping up the water intake helps, and magnesium also helped me. One of the easiest ways to deal with magnesium is to use magnesium "oil" on the skin - it is not so easy for the body to absorb magnesium through the stomach. I used a hot water bottle to keep the bone pain areas warm which also helped.

There are some people who have such bad side effects on imatinib that they need to change on to one of the other drugs, and that is covered in the talk.

Hope that helps.

Hi there.

I had severe (grade 3/4) bone pain and muscle pain when on imatinib. It was a dull ache, with intermittent shooting pain. 

After trying everything, with no improvement, the doctor and I decided to stop taking imatinib. The theory went that if it was caused by the imatinib alone the pain ought to improve significantly in about 5-6 days (due to the length of time it takes to be flushed out of your system). As if by magic I woke up on day 6 and the pains were gone.

So we switched me to dasatinib and the pain didn’t come back.

David.