Ask your doctor if gabapentin is wrong for you

Managing pain safely is not easy. Pain management using opioids ran into problems with genuine pain sufferers needing more and more of the drug to control their pain, and thus becoming addicted to them. Then prescription pain-killers found their way onto the streets, where they were widely abused. It now seems so naive that when heroin and oxycontin first came on the market they were promoted as being non-addictive. It took a while to find out the truth about that!

To avoid using opioid drugs, doctors turned to gabapentin and pregabalin, as they can help manage chronic pain, and have low addictive potential. So it was a nasty surprise when studies compared people who had used these drugs with people who had not, and found that the drugs very significantly increased the probability of both mild cognitive impairment and overt dementia. Also that the more often people were prescribed these drugs, and the longer each prescription was for, the higher the probability of cognitive problems.

Six or more prescriptions of gabapentin increased the likelihood by 85%, that within 10 years of their pain diagnosis, they would be diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment! Even more concerningly, the likelihood of being diagnosed with dementia in those 10 years rose by 29%. And while the problem was true for all ages, it was worse for people under the age of 50!

If you’d like to look more at the study results, here’s a link:  https://bmjgroup.com/nerve-pain-drug-gabapentin-linked-to-increased-dementia-cognitive-impairment-risks/

While the study suggested that physicians should monitor cognitive outcomes in patients prescribed gabapentin, we prefer to try other, more user-friendly treatments before considering using prescription medications that have such a down-side.

Gabapentin is often prescribed for nerve pain including pain after shingles, which can be quite extreme in some cases. It is also commonly used for diabetic neuropathy and restless leg syndrome. But there are alternatives: we know of several natural treatments that usually work for these problems.

Pfizer has promoted gabapentin’s “off-label” use for various other conditions, even after it was found ineffective for some of them. Pfizer payed a fine of $ 240 million for using “fraudulent scientific evidence” to promote off-label uses of gabapentin. However doctors’ prescription habits can be slow to change, especially when such information may not be brought to their attention. If you’d like to read a bit more about this, here’s the link. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC416587/

To paraphrase TV advertising, if you are taking Gabapentin, ask your doctor if gabapentin is wrong for you. And, although we hate to be the bearers of bad news, if you know someone who is using gabapentin, whether for pain relief or for other “off-label” uses, please bring this to their attention.