How Long Does Dihydrocodeine Stay in Your System?

How Long Does Dihydrocodeine Stay in Your System?

Dihydrocodeine is a semi-synthetic opioid medication, indicated to treat moderate to severe pain. I have discussed the strength of the medication here.

How long this medication remains in your blood, depends on many factors, including the amount how its absorbed, distributed, metabolised and elimination – what’s known as medications’ pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics. The amount of a medication you have taken and your overall underlying health status, including the health of your liver and kidneys will also influence the time spent in your system.

What Factors Influence How Long Dihydrocodeine Remains In Your System

One determining factor is the dosage of dihydrocodeine you have taken. If you have taken a high dose e.g more than 240mg in a 24-hour period, the enzymes that metabolise dihydrocodeine: Cytochrome p450, can become saturated. This means their metabolic capacity to metabolise this medication are compromised and they cannot metabolise the drug any quicker. As such this can lead to a slower clearance of the medication from your body.

The above situation can lead to several other physiological scenarios that will further increase the time dihydrocodeine remains in your system. With saturated liver enzymes, you may then be at risk of the reservoir effect. This is a situation wherein the medication that has not been metabolised, begins to accumulate in certain tissues throughout the body. These include fat, muscle tissue and the spleen. This can delay dihydrocodeine’s removal from your system and increase detection time as after a period of time the medication can then leech from these tissues into the blood stream.

Another consequence of enzyme saturation is zero order kinetics. Usually, a medication follows a proportional period of time for its removal from the body, this is known as first-order kinetics. In practice this means the higher amount of a medication you take, the faster it is removed from your system. However, when liver enzymes are saturated, drug metabolism and removal then begins to follow a constant pattern, irrespective of how much medication is present. Thus, in contrast to first-order kinetics where a medication’s elimination speeds up in response to higher drug concentrations, the elimination rate remains the same with zero order kinetics. This is so even despite higher concentration of the drug in your system. Ultimately, this can result in the medication taking longer to leave your system.

A further downstream effect is reduced renal clearance. The kidneys are responsible for filtering blood and removing various metabolites. When large concentrations of dihydrocodeine are circulating in the blood, this can overwhelm the kidneys. This can lead to saturated transporter protein within the kidney’s tubules, which are responsible for removing drugs and their metabolites from the blood. Evidently in light of this situation, dihydrocodeine would remain in your blood for longer.

Your overall health status will also influence how long dihydrocodeine remains in your system. Elderly individuals, i.e. those aged 65 and over, typically have reduced kidney and liver function. As we age, the kidneys’ glomerular filtration rate which is measure of how well the kidneys are filtering the blood declines. This mean that the kidneys are less efficient at removing waste products from the blood, and may lead to a delay in this medication being removed from your system. The normal functioning of the cytochrome liver enzymes is also reduced as we age. This can lead to a reduced breakdown of dihydrocodeine and prolonged period of time it remains in the blood.

Typical Detection Time Frames For Dihydrocodeine

There are individual variances for time it takes you to eliminate a medication. For example, a young adult i.e. between 18-40, in normal circumstances would expect to eliminate dihydrocodeine within the 24 hours after the last dose. Whereas, an older adult i.e. 65 and over, a typical time frame would be around 48 hours.

Typical examples of how long the medication remains detectable in urine is 2-4 days; in blood up to 24 hours and hair up to 90 days.

Conclusion

As documents, the rate at which dihydrocodeine is removed from your body will depend on several factors. If you are in pain and want a suitable treatment regime you can consult with me here.

References

1. Ammon, S., Hofmann, U., Griese, E.-U., Gugeler, N., & Mikus, G. (1999). Pharmacokinetics of dihydrocodeine and its active metabolite after single and multiple oral dosing. British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 48(3), 317–322. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2125.1999.00042.x

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