Yes, I can see why that article would catch your attention, but I think there are two rather different issues here, and the headline makes them sound much more alarming than the evidence warrants.
1. Cetirizine is not one of the antihistamines with the strongest dementia concern
The dementia concern that gets discussed in the medical literature is principally about long-term exposure to strongly anticholinergic drugs, particularly older first-generation antihistamines such as diphenhydramine (Benadryl). Long-term use of those drugs has been associated with increased dementia risk.
Cetirizine is a second-generation H1 antihistamine and is relatively free of anticholinergic activity. Its official product information describes its CNS effects mainly as somnolence, fatigue and dizziness, rather than significant anticholinergic effects.
So I would not interpret the article as evidence that your years of cetirizine use are likely to cause dementia. There isn't good evidence establishing that causal relationship.
There is, however, a practical wrinkle in your case: you're taking two 10-mg tablets a day, assuming your tablets are the usual 10 mg. That's 20 mg/day. Some product information permits 20 mg for particularly troublesome symptoms, but the ordinary adult dose is generally 5–10 mg/day, and some guidance specifically recommends starting people over 65 at 5 mg.
Given that you're 83 and your creatinine clearance has been around 64, I wouldn't regard 20 mg every day as something to change casually, but it is worth putting the exact dose in front of your doctor/pharmacist. It may turn out that 10 mg is enough for much of the year, or that another approach to the hay fever gives you equivalent control with less systemic antihistamine.
2. The "stops dreams" claim is particularly dubious
Your observation is actually quite relevant here.
Cetirizine can affect sleep and alertness, because a small amount reaches the brain despite being designed to be relatively nonsedating. Somnolence is a recognized adverse effect.
But "cetirizine stops dreams" is not the same thing as "cetirizine suppresses dreaming." We dream during REM sleep, and people normally have several dreams every night whether or not they remember them. A medication can alter sleep architecture or, more commonly, alter dream recall without eliminating dreaming.
And you say:
I dream a lot.
That's actually reassuring with respect to the article's particular claim. It certainly doesn't prove that cetirizine isn't affecting your REM sleep, but it makes the dramatic "cetirizine stops dreams" assertion rather obviously inapplicable to your experience.
In fact, I think the article has fallen into a classic journalistic trap: a pharmacological effect on sleep gets turned into a claim about whether the brain is capable of dreaming. Those aren't equivalent.
And your grammar checker...
I'm with you on this one. 😄
The drug is cetirizine, not cetirizines. In:
"two cetirizine a day"
cetirizine is functioning as a mass noun, like "two aspirin a day," "two coffee a day" (in a suitably informal construction), or "two grams of aspirin."
If you said:
"I take two cetirizine tablets a day"
then tablets is the count noun and everything is perfectly grammatical.
So your grammar checker is applying the rather crude rule "two things → plural noun." It doesn't understand that you're counting doses/amounts of a drug whose name is normally used as a mass noun.
And I'd make one distinction particularly strongly: I wouldn't stop an effective antihistamine merely because of that NewsMeter headline. Your hay fever control has a real and immediate benefit. The more interesting question is whether you actually need 20 mg/day, and whether there's a lower-dose or non-antihistamine regimen that controls the symptoms just as well. That is a much more concrete risk/benefit question than "does cetirizine cause dementia?"
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