Telbivudine: uses, dosing, side effects & brands
Telbivudine is a medicine sold in the U.S. under one brand. Below: what the FDA label says, every product that contains it, what the pills look like, and its recall record.
Key facts
- Available as
- Solution · Tablet
- Sold as
- Tyzeka
- Prescription?
- Prescription only
- Generic available?
- Not in our catalog
Every telbivudine product we track (1)
Same active ingredient — different manufacturer, form, price and FDA recall record. That last one is what our independent score measures.
Only one: Tyzeka.
Telbivudine and breastfeeding
From LactMed, the US National Library of Medicine’s Drugs and Lactation Database — quoted, not rewritten.
Full LactMed record for telbivudine: levels in milk, effects in breastfed infants, and the drugs it would consider insteadTelbivudine has been discontinued from the US market. It has not been studied in nursing mothers being treated for hepatitis B infection. An alternate drug may be preferred, especially while nursing a newborn or preterm infant.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, record revised April 15, 2023. LactMed states its information is not a substitute for professional judgement.
What people report to the FDA about telbivudine
The FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) collects reports from patients and clinicians. It holds 367 reports naming telbivudine, and the FDA flagged 99% of those reports as serious. The effects reported most often — leaving out reports about overdose, misuse or the condition being treated, which dominate the raw list for common medicines:
- drug resistance102 reports
- blood creatine phosphokinase increased55 reports
- pathogen resistance50 reports
- myalgia42 reports
- viral mutation identified38 reports
- treatment failure34 reports
- muscular weakness30 reports
- foetal exposure during pregnancy22 reports
Read these as a signal, not a rate. A report does not mean telbivudine caused the effect — anyone can file one, and many describe people taking several medicines for several conditions. Crucially there is no denominator: FAERS does not record how many people took the drug, so these counts cannot be turned into “X% of patients” — a bigger number often just means a more widely used or more talked-about drug. Duplicates exist, and publicity drives reporting. For what is actually established, read the FDA label section above.
Source: openFDA drug/event (FAERS), retrieved July 26, 2026.
Related calculators
Frequently asked questions
Can you take telbivudine with other medicines?
It depends on the medicine. We check it against the FDA labels rather than guessing: our interaction checker searches each drug's own label for the other and quotes what it says, naming the section it came from. Run telbivudine against whatever else you take — and remember that a label not naming a drug is not the same as that combination being safe.
What forms does telbivudine come in?
Across the brands we track, telbivudine is currently marketed as solution and tablet, per the FDA's National Drug Code Directory. Each form is dosed differently — follow the label for the exact product you were prescribed.
Is there a generic telbivudine?
We do not currently list a generic-labelled telbivudine product. That does not always mean none exists — it means none appears under a generic name in the FDA data we track. Ask your pharmacist.
Cite this page
- APA
- pharmaranks. (2026, July 24). Telbivudine: uses, dosing, side effects & brands. https://pharmaranks.com/drugs/telbivudine
- MLA
- “Telbivudine: uses, dosing, side effects & brands.” pharmaranks, 24 July 2026, https://pharmaranks.com/drugs/telbivudine.
We summarise public FDA and NIH sources — for a clinical claim, cite the primary source we link to as well.
Sources: FDA openFDA drug label, National Drug Code Directory, and Enforcement (recall) database. This page reproduces public FDA data and is not medical advice. Dosing is set by your prescriber.
Read the full FDA label for telbivudine on DailyMed (NIH) ↗.