I’ve recently been put on the drug and I think it would ease my mind if I knew how it actually worked.
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I was on it many years ago. It dries out your skin. I would make sure you drink a good amount of water a day. I didn’t have any side effects other than super dry skin.
Basically, it reduces the amount of oil produced by the skin’s oil glands. With less oil, there are less clogged pores. With less clogged pores, you have less acne.
Speaking from experience, it works *really* well. I took it in high school, and would take it again 100 times out of 100.
I was talking to my wife about it. She said her friends were noticeably more irritable/hormonal when they were on it, so much so that she didn’t want to go on it as a kid. It works wonders though, and I would 100% chosen to do it if my acne was bad enough to warrant it.
It is basically vitamin A on steroids. Vitamin A speeds up skin cell turn-over, which, in turn, prevents the buildup of naturally-occuring oils and dead skin cells that can cause acne. The downside is that cell turn-over becomes so rapid that your skin, mucous membranes (lips, oral cavity, tongue, gums, anus, labia minora and vaginal canal (if you have female genitalia), and glans (if you have male genitalia), and eyes can become extremely dry due to reduced oil production.
Liver side-effects are due to the fact that vitamin A builds up in your body. As a fat-soluble vitamin, you cannot get rid of excess vitamin A by urination/defecation, like you can with other vitamins. Too much vitamin A can cause really serious liver issues due to toxicity.
Accutane use in pregnant persons causes excessive cell death in very important neurons (nervous system cells) in the developing embryo’s neural crest (the part of the embryo that will form the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system).
The only validated permanent side effects I could find were death and loss of vision, both due to increased intracranial pressure (basically the pressure inside your skull becomes too high and causes your brain to herniate (move where it should not go) into the space where the spinal cord canal begins, at the base of the skull). These side effects are **extremely rare**. Accutane use in combination with tetracycline drugs may coorelate with an increased risk of increased intracranial pressure. Accutane, as noted above can cause vitamin A toxicity (also known as Hypervitaminosis A), which can impact multiple organ systems, including the brain.
Hard to say with certainty but I had a personal experience with accutane that led me to believe it was responsible for acute suicidal depression. Which is weird because it totally cured my acne and that was causing me to be depressed prior. Just one day was super sad and wanted to die for absolutely no reason. Stopped taking it, mood shifted in a couple days and the acne stayed gone.
Took accutane in HS. Got rid of my acne.
While on the medication i was extremely sensitive to UV, and debatably still am.
I also ended up with a permanent side effect of extremely high hemoglobin too. Weird.
Please take great precaution to not get pregnant while taking Accutane. Take more than one pregnancy test and stop if you suspect you might be pregnant.
My wife was on it for her acne. Before getting prescribed, they did a quick pregnancy test using the kind you can get at a store. Some time after, she didn’t like taking the pills for some odd reason and stopped. It wasn’t long that she discovered through ultrasound, to be a couple of weeks pregnant.
The doctor told us there was an extremely high chance the baby would be born with problems. We decided to keep her and face whatever may come together. She was born with part of her brain deformed. She cannot communicate and is at the absolute mercy of whoever is watching her as she cannot feed herself and is in diapers. She has a sleep schedule that would torture the bravest souls as she can never sleep more than a few hours.
She is now in her twenties and of average health. She is happy more often than not and usually wants of nothing other than keeping the room temperature at 75f or lower. She’s currently awake as I write this and Hammer House Of Terror is playing in the background. She does require constant vigilance and guesswork to figure out what she wants.
Although her smile and laughter will turn our crappy days upside down, the responsibility and dedication necessary are far beyond what an average kid requires. She’s not on meds or machines. We got lucky.
As someone who took Accutane as a happy, joyous 15yr old, and is now a 41yr old, still suffering from major depression as a direct result of this drug, all I can say is at least my liver didn’t get fried. Oh, and the endless dandruff, eczema and sensitive face skin is also a joy to live with. But hey, at least people told me that my skin looked so much clearer for a week or two.
My oldest son was on it for about 6 months after 3 or 4 other treatments did not help his acne. After about 1 month, his breakouts ended and now 3 years later, his skin never has any breakouts.
I noticed he was a bit moodier than normal, but no other side effects.
Ill admit, both my parents and I regret me not taking it as a teen. I was tormented endlessly for my acne, and have mild scarring from it. But if i would have known a few months of treatments and my face would have been clear would have been a godsend. Oh well.
Just make damn sure to be upfront and listen to your derm on dossage, blood tests, etc.
The exact biochemical mechanism of action is not known. It gave me the big sad, which didn’t go away until a few months after I stopped. 0/10 would not dose again
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