Doses
ExamplePick the tablet or capsule and how many. The app works out the levodopa mg.
No doses yet. Add the first dose, or try an example to see how it works.
Your day
Your day will appear here. Add a dose to see when the level dips, how high it goes, and the daily LEDD.
Comparing with the day you pinned (grey dashed line).
Levodopa level over a typical day
100 = the peak from one 100 mg immediate-release levodopa dose (e.g. one Sinemet 25/100 tablet).
The day repeats, so midnight includes what is left from last night’s doses.
| Dose | Before | Since last dose | Peak after |
|---|
Your own lines (optional)
Draw your own lines to see how long the level sits below or above them. These are your guesses, not measured cutoffs.
A level you think this person needs to feel ON.
A level above which you think dyskinesia may start.
How to read this chart
- The thick black line is the modeled levodopa level from all doses added together. Thin coloured lines are single doses, and ▲ marks when each is taken.
- 100 is the peak from one 100 mg immediate-release dose, such as one Sinemet 25/100 tablet. 200 is about twice that.
- Levodopa leaves the blood fast: about half is gone in 1½ hours (Nutt 2008). So immediate-release doses rise and fall sharply, and extended-release products spread the level out.
- In later PD, symptoms follow the level more closely. Wearing-off tends to line up with low points, and peak-dose dyskinesia with high points. Some dyskinesia comes at low levels instead (Contin 2010). Early in PD, a long-duration response builds up over weeks. It lifts the low points, which may partly explain why early wearing-off goes unnoticed (Nutt 2008).
- In advanced PD, the body’s response trails the blood level by roughly half an hour (Mao 2013), so symptoms come a little after the times shown. Early in PD the lag is much longer. Meals, protein and stomach emptying also shift real levels.
Hour-by-hour table
Save or open a schedule file
Save this schedule as a small file on your device. Nothing is uploaded.
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Medicines, strengths and sources
This covers five levodopa products. Levodopa infusions, dopamine agonists, MAO-B inhibitors, COMT inhibitors and other add-on medicines are not shown on the chart.
How this works and its limits
Doses are added together over a day that repeats. Each product has a simple modeled shape: a rise to a peak, then a fall. Extended-release products add a slower second part. The Sinemet IR, Rytary and Crexont shapes are fitted to single-dose studies in advanced PD. Sinemet CR uses PD and healthy-volunteer data. Inbrija uses healthy-volunteer data only. The size of each curve follows how much levodopa reaches the blood compared with an immediate-release tablet.
Not modeled: meals and protein, slow stomach emptying, kidney and liver function, drug interactions, the carbidopa amount (10/100 and 25/100 tablets are drawn the same), and differences between people.
The chart shows modeled blood levels, not how a person moves. The body’s response trails the level by roughly half an hour in advanced PD, and the level each person needs changes as PD advances (Mao 2013; Contin 2010).
Blood-level studies report ng/mL. For example, Wach 2026 cites older studies that put the level where levodopa starts to work at about 750–1000 ng/mL. That level differs between people and rises as PD advances (Contin 2010). Those studies used different people and methods, so treat any conversion to this chart’s scale as rough.
LEDD uses the consensus conversion factors of Jost 2023. Crexont was approved after that review, so its factor (×0.5, the Rytary factor) is an assumption; its label switches from Rytary at about 1:1 by levodopa mg.