How Long Does Suboxone Stay in Your System
Buprenorphine has a half-life of about 24 to 42 hours. One lab reference lists a urine detection window of 1 to 10 days. What a test can and cannot tell you.
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Suboxone can stay in your body for several days after a dose. The buprenorphine in it has a half-life of about 24 to 42 hours, and a urine test designed to find buprenorphine may detect it for roughly one to ten days. There is no single deadline that applies to everyone.
When considering the available treatments to aid in your recovery, it helps to understand the half-life of Suboxone.
Taking Suboxone can be an important first step in your overall recovery, and it is reasonable to want to know how long it stays in your system. Below we walk through what a half-life is, what Suboxone is, and what the numbers do and do not tell you.
What Is a Half-Life?
Before diving into the specifics of Suboxone treatment, it's important to understand what a half-life is in the first place.
You may remember this term from your science classes growing up.
In short, the half-life of a medication is the time needed for the amount in the body to fall to half of its starting value. It does not mean the drug is gone. The idea is used in many scientific settings. For example, nuclear physicists and researchers use the half-life to explain rates of radioactive decay.
This can be useful for things like scientific dating. Doctors also use the half-life of a medication to understand how long patients can expect treatment benefits. The longer the half-life of the medication, the longer it stays in the patient's system.
Depending on the drug, the amount of medication in the system can have a variable effect. This will depend on the medication and the patient's sensitivity to the drug. If a drug is present at 70 percent of the initial value within three hours of taking it, it may or may not still be effective.
The half-life does provide a general curve to understand how long you can expect treatment effects to last after receiving a dose.
What Is Suboxone?
Suboxone is a combination medication. It contains buprenorphine, a partial opioid agonist, with another drug called naloxone.
Suboxone is used to treat opioid use disorder and to support patients in their recovery.
Addiction medicine providers should provide compassionate care no matter your background. The story of how you became dependent on opioids is not the primary concern. You should never receive any judgment depending on your background.
Ultimately, medications like Suboxone can help patients struggling with addiction get back to their lives.
Opioids, also known as narcotics, are a certain type of pain reliever. They are usually prescribed by healthcare providers to reduce chronic or severe pain. Opioids bind to proteins on nerve cells throughout the body, blocking pain signals and often leading to a positive sensation.
However, when opioids are used over the long term they can lead to chemical dependence. This means that patients continue to take opioids just to feel like their baseline selves instead of seeing continued treatment benefits.
How Suboxone Helps
Suboxone is a medication used for patients in this situation. Buprenorphine, one of the components of Suboxone, is a long-acting partial opioid agonist.
This may seem counterintuitive. However, it helps reduce withdrawal and cravings, so patients have less need to seek the opioid they were using. Some people take it for a long time and others for a shorter time. Long-term medication may be appropriate, and there is no mandatory treatment endpoint. CDC: Treating opioid use disorder
Naloxone, the second part of the medication, is included primarily to discourage certain forms of misuse. Buprenorphine provides the main treatment effect. Used as prescribed, the combination can help patients a great deal in recovering from opioid use disorder.
What Is the Half-Life of Suboxone?
Because Suboxone is taken regularly, it's important to know the half-life.
The most common route for taking Suboxone is under the tongue, also known as sublingual administration. The Suboxone film prescribing information reports a mean elimination half-life of approximately 24 to 42 hours for buprenorphine. That is the time for the level in the body to fall by half, not the time for the drug to disappear completely. FDA Suboxone prescribing information
The two ingredients have different timelines, and several factors affect how your body handles the medication. Repeated daily use, liver function, interacting medicines and other individual factors all change how much of the drug is in your body.
Age can also play a part.
If you have other medical conditions affecting your liver, this can also affect how the medication is processed. Most of the metabolism of Suboxone takes place in the liver, so liver problems can make it harder for the body to eliminate Suboxone.
Long-acting buprenorphine injections are different products and should not be given the same timeline as Suboxone film.
Understanding the Half-Life of Suboxone
At the end of the day, the half-life of the buprenorphine in Suboxone is approximately 24 to 42 hours. How long it stays in your own body depends on you and your baseline health.
How long a test can find it is a separate question. ARUP lists an estimated urine detection window of one to ten days for buprenorphine. The actual result depends on the assay, the cutoff, the dose, the pattern of use and the person being tested. ARUP laboratory detection-window reference
A test must be designed to detect buprenorphine or its metabolites. A general "opiate" screen is not interchangeable with a buprenorphine-specific test. A positive result from prescribed treatment is not evidence of addiction by itself, and a detectable drug level does not necessarily mean someone is impaired.
Ultimately, talking to your doctor is the best way to understand what the Suboxone half-life means for your personal situation. Do not stop Suboxone on your own before a procedure or to obtain a negative drug test. Contact your prescriber so the plan accounts for withdrawal, pain, cravings and overdose risk.
Keep naloxone available. If someone is difficult to wake or breathing abnormally, call 911 and give naloxone if available. CDC: Responding to an overdose
Start Suboxone treatment online. Recovery Delivered's online Suboxone doctors see patients by video. The first visit is $89. Follow-up visits are $50 weekly, $75 every two weeks or $89 monthly. Visits are cash pay, and medication is priced separately.