Chronic use of antihistamines and strength training

Medical Q&A [Moderated]
1

Doctors,

I’m sorry if you’ve covered this before - I searched the forums and podcasts as best I could but there’s every chance I missed something.

My occupation has me needing to take antihistamines (generally 10-20 mg loratadine) quite regularly, often several times in a week.

To your knowledge, is this kind of thing likely to be detrimental to my training recovery or ongoing strength adaptations?

I’m of course going to keep training either way, but wondered if I should aim to limit using the drug where possible because of these concerns.

I’ve heard some mention that these types of drugs can impair recovery to physical activity (someone sent me the following article on the subject https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf2856), so I would love your perspective on whether or not I should consider this to be significant or even relevant.

Thanks in advance and thank you for all of your outstanding content.

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2

There are some theoretical mechanisms of relevance here and a bit of evidence relating to changes in exercise adaptations from histamine receptor blockade … but I would not be too concerned with this if it were me, especially if I needed the meds to be able to function day-to-day. As with any drug, we typically aim to use the lowest dose necessary to achieve the therapeutic goal, so if you can use less without any significant negative impact on your day to day life/function, that’s fine – but that would be advisable regardless of any potential impact on training anyway.

3

Thanks very much Austin, that’s really helpful