Prednisone for radiation pneumonitis

I'm glad the Prednisone helped you. It is good for breathing problems. However, do a search on the Mayo Clinic for the side effects of it. They aren't good if you take it too often.
I wish you the best.
PML

I’ve had pneumonitis twice follow SBRT. Each time the prednisone treatment ran about 6 months starting at 60mg. It does a fabulous job of relieving breathing issues but the side affects are difficult. Dr. Google can give you the full list of the side affects, I had them all. The surprise for me was diabetes, I felt so ill I went to ER with blood sugar so high they had to use a special method to measure my blood sugar, over 750.

I developed pneumonitis after starting Tagrisso for 6 weeks. All 5 lobes were involved. They gave me high dose steroids that Did the job in 3 days & discharged me without oxygen. Sent me home with 9 days of steroids and I have had no problems since I stopped taking them 11 days ago. Pulse ox is good and not missing terrible side effects from Tagrisso. Will start on another immunotherapy next month and hope my body can tolerate it better.

I developed pneumonitis (with shatter glass showing on CD scan) after immunotherapy on Halloween. Doctors finally put me on prednisone 80mg the end of Nov, with step down to almost Christmas. Within days of stopping the wheezing is back. It is worse in the afternoon and evening, ( assuming that might be because I sleep with O2 at night with my cpap). Heading to my pcp today to see what they suggest. My biggest concerns is that this occurred after only one immunotherapy to try to shrink the mass in my lung, to make surgery easier. Now that this is reoccurring, I am not sure if the surgeon will even do the surgery! Scared! What now?

I wasn't a candidate for surgery so did 6 chemotherapy and30 radiation. Put me on Tagrisso & I developed pneumonitis after 6 weeks. Some times the immunotherapy is the problem. It certainly was for me. I sailed through initial treatments so totally unprepared for adverse reaction to Tagrisso

I read up on all those, there are quite a few of them. I'm on my third dose with two more days to go, I'm hoping I won't need any more.

It seems to be helpful for me during the day but I'm still waking up with quite a bit of chest congestion. The ER doc prescribed me five days' worth and I'm only on my third day of taking it. I'm not exactly convinced that after I finish it the pneumonitis will be gone.

Have you also experienced no sense of taste or smell with the pneumonitis? At first I thought I had covid, but I tested myself and so did the ER and I was negative. I can't taste or smell anything.

The immunotherapy and targeted drugs are so unpredictable in terms of what kind of side effects we'll experience. I'm not a candidate for radiation anymore and my oncologist is planning on starting me on Keytruda when another nodule starts (it looks like there's already another one becoming malignant). He wanted to wait until at least spring for my lungs to heal from the radiation because he said there's a much higher chance of getting pneumonitis with keytruda after radiation. It looks like I got it anyway.

What kind of immunotherapy drug are you taking? As I mentioned below, my oncologst is wanting to start me on keytruda but wants to wait until spring because he's concerned that previous radiation treatment puts me at high risk for pneumonitis (but it's already happened). After reading about so many serious side effects I'm very wary of trying keytruda out, especially because my PD-L1 status is 0. I'm wondering if your pcp will just continue to prescribe prednisone so you can continue the treatment? Please give us an update.

My non-expert thought is that a 5 day taper for pneumonitis is brief, but obviously I don't know your situation so take this comment for what it is. I developed pneumonitis 30+ days after receiving 54GY of SBRT. For me, pneumonitis caused significant breathing issues and fatigue but I don't recall losing my sense of taste and smell.

I suggest you contact your radiologist about the pneumonitis and prednisone treatment. Don't know how severe your pneumonitis is but I know it needs to be treated for you to recover.