Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Levocarnitine (Oral Route, Intravenous Route)
Drug Information provided by: MicromedexUS Brand Names
|
|
Description
Levocarnitine is used to prevent and treat a lack of carnitine. It is used to prevent and treat this condition in patients with kidney disease on dialysis. It is given to people whose body cannot properly use carnitine from their diet. Lack of carnitine can lead to liver, heart, and muscle problems. Your doctor may treat lack of carnitine by prescribing levocarnitine for you.
Carnitine comes in two forms. Levocarnitine (L-carnitine) should not be confused with the D,L-carnitine form (labeled as “vitamin B T”'). Only the L-form of carnitine is used by the body to treat serious carnitine deficiency. The D,L-form does not help the body use fat and can actually interfere with and cause a lack of levocarnitine.
Certain levocarnitine products have been specifically approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for medical use and are available only with your doctor's prescription.
Once a medicine has been approved for marketing for a certain use, experience may show that it is also useful for other medical problems. Although this use is not included in product labeling, levocarnitine is used in certain patients with the following medical condition:
- Carnitine deficiency that results from treatment with valproic acid
This product is available in the following dosage forms:
- Capsule
- Tablet
- Solution
- Wafer
- Powder
