Effect of Food and Interactions
Food enhances the absorption of both artemether and lumefantrine, and patients are advised to take the tablets with food as soon as a meal can be tolerated. Coartem has a potential to prolong the QT interval, so combinations with other drugs having that property can cause irregular heartbeat, potentially leading to lethal ventricular fibrillation. The combination with halofantrine, another antimalarial, can cause a life-threatening QT prolongation. Drugs and other substances influencing the activity of the liver enzyme CYP3A4, including grapefruit juice, can either increase or lower blood levels of artemether/lumefantrine, depending on the sort of substance. This can either lead to more severe side effects or to reduced efficiency.
Read more about this topic: Artemether/lumefantrine
Famous quotes containing the words effect, food and/or interactions:
“At first I intended to become a student of the Senate rules and I did learn much about them, but I soon found that the Senate had but one fixed rule, subject to exceptions of course, which was to the effect that the Senate would do anything it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur’s work.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)