Description
Advantages
A dose given at 6:30pm does not begin taking affect until 6:30am, 12 hours later. It then lasts another 12 hours. An excellent medication if you are having difficulty getting your child ready for school in the morning.
Disadvantages
Timing of the dose is critical. Give too early the night before and it would take effect earlier, affecting breakfast appetite. Give too late and it may not take effect early in the morning, but last much longer in the evening affecting sleep. Difficult to balance timing effects with changes in daily schedule, such as sleeping in on the weekends. Expensive and not usually covered by insurance.
Excerpt from the book: ADHD Medications: Does It Work and Is It Save? Available on Amazon
One unique characteristic of most ADHD medications is that a reduction in the ADHD behaviors is usually evident the first day after starting medication, and within an hour of the first dose. However, that hour can be wicked. You are under a time limit to get your child dressed, feed him breakfast, brush his teeth, and get ready to get in the car or out of the house to catch the bus. Oh, and you have to remember to remind him to bring his homework that he spent two hours on last night, and, oh, yes, don’t forget his lunch, his jacket, and that candy sculpture that he wants to bring to school for show and tell.
If your child wakes up at 6:30, and you must leave for school at 7:30, then you have an hour to accomplish all these tasks. One solution is to make sure to give him his medication as soon as he wakes up so that it will kick in as soon as possible, usually in a half hour.
Next, have him eat before he gets dressed and before his medica- tion kicks in. But that only gives you a half hour of workable time. And once his medication begins to take effect, it may decrease his appetite.
Or you could give him a newer medication, Jornay PM. Jornay PM is a very long-acting methylphenidate medication designed to help with exactly this situation. Jornay PM does not start to take effect until twelve hours after it is swallowed, so it is given the night before. A dose given at 6:30 p.m. will start to take effect about 6:30 a.m. the next morning, about the time your child wakes up.17 This is a big advantage, because you don’t have to wait the half hour that other medications would require to take effect. On the other hand, because the medication is already effective when he wakes up, his appetite may be decreased as well.
Jornay PM has one other potential benefit. The irritability that often occurs in the afternoon as other medications wears off is less likely with Jornay PM, although this had not been well studied.
Jornay is similar to the coated beads that other medications (Ritalin LA, Metadate CD) use, but it has an extra-thick coating on the outside to delay the release of the medication until twelve hours after taking it.
