Benzo stored in fat causing waves??

This is very logical. I tend to believe it. The metabolites of Valium are also stored in places we don't even want to think about. Since I basically have no body fat, my visceral fat, grey matter, bone marrow, receptors in the eyes, ears, and muscles are all fair game. This may be why I'm having so much more trouble than many people with even very small daily micro tapers.

I also think waves can be caused by exposure to high glutamate processed products, natural food sources, and glutamates that are now loaded in our soaps, shampoos, bath gels, lotions, etc.

This is very logical. I tend to believe it. The metabolites of Valium are also stored in places we don't even want to think about. Since I basically have no body fat, my visceral fat, grey matter, bone marrow, receptors in the eyes, ears, and muscles are all fair game. This may be why I'm having so much more trouble than many people with even very small daily micro tapers.

 

I also think waves can be caused by exposure to high glutamate processed products, natural food sources, and glutamates that are now loaded in our soaps, shampoos, bath gels, lotions, etc.

you have hit the nail on the head. this is what it's all about i think......i am sure.

especially the bone marrow .

I wonder will we ever know what these drugs have done;at the very least the drug companies owe us that.

They also owe me the 50 grand I would have made in the last year and a half of work and around a billion dollars worth of horrible suffering! Not to mention the medical bills and the lost money from my mom taking days off to take care of me.

...make that 2 billion

Benzos are stored in a variety of tissues including fat, bone marrow and skeletal muscle. All of these tissues  remain in equilibrium with our serum levels. Substances stored in our bodies don't just dump into the serum in chunks. The benzos are going to come out of these tissues at a constant rate maintaining that equilibrium. I think that diet, particularly relating to glutamate, stimulants, variable sleep quality and quantity, stress levels and other physical or psychological disruptions are significant factors in symptom variability. Another factor, IMO, is the nature of the healing process. There seem to be a number of pathways involved in healing. It's more than just up-regulating GABA receptors and down-regulating glutamate. It is reasonable to assume all these pathways in addition to the better understood GABA/glutamate balance will not change in a symmetrical manner and at the same rate, adding to symptom variation.

Bart, nice to see you down to fumes now. 

How is that going and how are your symptoms?

Hi Becksblue

The cutoff for positive on urine drug screens is 200 or 300ng/ml. depending on the lab. Using the more sensitive number of 200ng/ml means that If you excrete 1 liter of urine per day you will test negative when your Valium excretion rate falls below 0.2mg/day. Valium accumulates in tissue up to 8x our daily dose and then comes out on aggregate at a constant rate. I'd say your doctor knows about as much about benzos as a lot of others we hear about on BB.

Hi One

Thanks. Except for some tinnitus I'm usually not aware of, no symptoms. I'm done and in fade out mode. Incidentally, in case anyone's interested, if you have .01mg of Valium in your body you have around 2x10¹⁶ molecules total in your tissues and serum. The elimination half life of Valium is 36-200 hours. If you take the middle of this you get 118 hours or about 5 days. To lose 90% of the Valium or 1 power of 10 you will need about 3 1/2 half lives or about 18 days. To get every last molecule out of your body will therefore need 16 x 18 days which is 288 days. Of course, any significant effect is long gone by that time.

Bart

The op makes sense to me.

Once when my doc did blood work on me, it showed that I had no clonazepam in my system, and at that time I was on around .875 mg a day.  That seemed weird to me. 

Hi Becksblue

The cutoff for positive on urine drug screens is 200 or 300ng/ml. depending on the lab. Using the more sensitive number of 200ng/ml means that If you excrete 1 liter of urine per day you will test negative when your Valium excretion rate falls below 0.2mg/day. Valium accumulates in tissue up to 8x our daily dose and then comes out on aggregate at a constant rate. I'd say your doctor knows about as much about benzos as a lot of others we hear about on BB.

 

Hi One

Thanks. Except for some tinnitus I'm usually not aware of, no symptoms. I'm done and in fade out mode. Incidentally, in case anyone's interested, if you have .01mg of Valium in your body you have around 2x10¹⁶ molecules total in your tissues and serum. The elimination half life of Valium is 36-200 hours. If you take the middle of this you get 118 hours or about 5 days. To lose 90% of the Valium or 1 power of 10 you will need about 3 1/2 half lives or about 18 days. To get every last molecule out of your body will therefore need 16 x 18 days which is 288 days. Of course, any significant effect is long gone by that time.

Bart

I do have a very smart doctor.  He's benzowise and that helps me a great deal.  I think the fat storage explains the windows early on, but not months down the road.  Or am I wrong?  I can't imagine it could stay stored in fat cells for months?  I don't understand all your brilliant math on this I'm having anxiety tonight from taking Amoxicillin for my newly diagnosed Lyme disease, but with your calcs how much time does it stay in the fat cells?  Maybe an example in layman's terms. 

Hi Becksblue

The cutoff for positive on urine drug screens is 200 or 300ng/ml. depending on the lab. Using the more sensitive number of 200ng/ml means that If you excrete 1 liter of urine per day you will test negative when your Valium excretion rate falls below 0.2mg/day. Valium accumulates in tissue up to 8x our daily dose and then comes out on aggregate at a constant rate. I'd say your doctor knows about as much about benzos as a lot of others we hear about on BB.

 

Hi One

Thanks. Except for some tinnitus I'm usually not aware of, no symptoms. I'm done and in fade out mode. Incidentally, in case anyone's interested, if you have .01mg of Valium in your body you have around 2x10¹⁶ molecules total in your tissues and serum. The elimination half life of Valium is 36-200 hours. If you take the middle of this you get 118 hours or about 5 days. To lose 90% of the Valium or 1 power of 10 you will need about 3 1/2 half lives or about 18 days. To get every last molecule out of your body will therefore need 16 x 18 days which is 288 days. Of course, any significant effect is long gone by that time.

Bart

I've stored this info for future reference, thanks so much.

Given that you used only half of the maximum half-life for computations, if a person had slower clearance rates, faster taper schedule, AND jumped from higher levels, this could EASILY explain the terrible longer term wd effects such people suffer after jumping?

Bart, you sound like a genius to me! I am hopeless at math, which is why I don't understand a word that u said . I am a dummy for sure. My head actually hurts when I try to get it!

            I so would love to be able to unlock the mystery of maths!

I guess this is the right section for this question.. ie chewing the fat.

I think this is what acid flashbacks were said to be caused by? My knowledge of this predates the internet.

Hi Becksblue

The cutoff for positive on urine drug screens is 200 or 300ng/ml. depending on the lab. Using the more sensitive number of 200ng/ml means that If you excrete 1 liter of urine per day you will test negative when your Valium excretion rate falls below 0.2mg/day. Valium accumulates in tissue up to 8x our daily dose and then comes out on aggregate at a constant rate. I'd say your doctor knows about as much about benzos as a lot of others we hear about on BB.

 

Hi One

Thanks. Except for some tinnitus I'm usually not aware of, no symptoms. I'm done and in fade out mode. Incidentally, in case anyone's interested, if you have .01mg of Valium in your body you have around 2x10¹⁶ molecules total in your tissues and serum. The elimination half life of Valium is 36-200 hours. If you take the middle of this you get 118 hours or about 5 days. To lose 90% of the Valium or 1 power of 10 you will need about 3 1/2 half lives or about 18 days. To get every last molecule out of your body will therefore need 16 x 18 days which is 288 days. Of course, any significant effect is long gone by that time.

Bart

 

I've stored this info for future reference, thanks so much.

 

Given that you used only half of the maximum half-life for computations, if a person had slower clearance rates, faster taper schedule, AND jumped from higher levels, this could EASILY explain the terrible longer term wd effects such people suffer after jumping?

Hi One.

I think you're right about that. I used the average half life. Interesting, all the people who say the half life of Valium is 200 hours. Actually it varies a whole lot among individuals and ranges from 36-200 hours. Your chances that Valium's half life for you being 36 hours is the same as it being 200 hours. The average of this is (36+200)/2=118 hours or about 5 days. It takes slightly less than 3 1/2 half lives to reduce a drug by 90% or 1 power of 10. I rounded things off to simplify the math. There was a survey of people who had completed their tapers which found that the most difficult time for the most people was at the end and right after the end of their tapers. I suspect the reason for this is that you are not exactly "jumping" from your last dose. You are going to 0 from the total amount of benzo in your body which is a whole lot more than your last dose. This amount is determined by 2 factors. One is the very long half life of Valium which will lead to accumulation by its own right. The other factor is related and is due to tissue distribution and accumulation of the drug which in the case of Valium is around 8 times your daily dose. So when you think you are jumping from a very low dose, in reality you are not. IMO this is the real reason the end of the taper is so "difficult" and helps symptoms go on and on. If you look at my sig line you will see how slow I went at the very end which is why I ended the taper with essentially no symptoms unless I do something "bad" to bring them out like have too much sugar, alcohol, too much stress, not enough rest, etc. Hope this helps.

Bart

I think you're right about that. I used the average half life. Interesting, all the people who say the half life of Valium is 200 hours. Actually it varies a whole lot among individuals and ranges from 36-200 hours. Your chances that Valium's half life for you being 36 hours is the same as it being 200 hours. The average of this is (36+200)/2=118 hours or about 5 days. It takes slightly less than 3 1/2 half lives to reduce a drug by 90% or 1 power of 10. I rounded things off to simplify the math. There was a survey of people who had completed their tapers which found that the most difficult time for the most people was at the end and right after the end of their tapers. I suspect the reason for this is that you are not exactly "jumping" from your last dose. You are going to 0 from the total amount of benzo in your body which is a whole lot more than your last dose. This amount is determined by 2 factors. One is the very long half life of Valium which will lead to accumulation by its own right. The other factor is related and is due to tissue distribution and accumulation of the drug which in the case of Valium is around 8 times your daily dose. So when you think you are jumping from a very low dose, in reality you are not. IMO this is the real reason the end of the taper is so "difficult" and helps symptoms go on and on. If you look at my sig line you will see how slow I went at the very end which is why I ended the taper with essentially no symptoms unless I do something "bad" to bring them out like have too much sugar, alcohol, too much stress, not enough rest, etc.

Hiya Bart.  Interesting calculations and interesting conclusions. 

I have always been somewhat skeptical about that 200 hour upper figure for diazepam's half-life.  It seems too much like an estimate than a value determined by experiment.  However as it seems to have widespread acceptance then I will go along with it although this author suggests an appreciably shorter half-life of 26-50 hours.  http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Xx7iNGdV25IC&pg=PA467

I like to use the geometric mean of the lower and upper limits of the 36 to 200 hours range which gives a slightly different average of 84 hours or 3.5 days.  This doesn't really make any difference to your conclusions.

As this thread started by hypothesizing about diazepam in body fat then there's an additional factor in this study which established that "Diazepam elimination half-life was greatly prolonged in the obese subjects (82 vs. 32 hours)" and "for desmethyldiazepam, elimination half-life was prolonged in obese subjects (130 vs. 56) hours". http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6415130  Oh no ... now we have to take our body weight into account!   

Hey Braban

Thanks for the info. There seems to be a lot of variation among individuals, huh? My overall point was Valium takes a long time to all be eliminated from your body but it does come out of fat cells at a steady rate. It does not come out in irregular quantities causing variation in symptoms.

Bart

Hi Braban,

The fat storage thing had me concerned too.  I have been actually losing weight while I taper due mostly to lack of appetite and trying to eat as carefully as possible to avoid symptoms.  52lbs so far since I started.

Bart, in one of your earlier posts last month you spoke of making changes to your diet to address symptoms.

Will you share with us what you are doing now.  I know you said you are a vegetarian and you did not believe that the cruciferous veggies were affecting you.  Is that still the case?

Please share! 

Hi eliz

I would think gaining or losing fat during benzo withdrawal could effect overall benzo levels but the effect would be quite modest. IMO, unopposed excess glutamate has a lot to do with our symptoms. Reducing dietary glutamate seems like a reasonable thing to do. Onelove has posted good stuff on this. I've reduced my intake a little as well as cut down on sugars and chocolate (bummer). If I had more in the way of symptoms I would make a bigger effort to reduce glutamate. We went out to a Mongolian barbecue about a week ago and everybody got hit with MSG symptoms. Surprisingly, my symptoms seemed about the same as everybody else's. I was never been able to tell any difference in symptoms that correlated with my intake of cruciferous vegetables. Others will have a different experience. Still a vegetarian.

The benzos are going to come out of these tissues at a constant rate maintaining that equilibrium.

Does this mean that once our serum levels are undetectable that the drug is completely out of our system?