Neurontin Withdrawl.. Was it helping or not? (Part 1)

In this post, I share ongoing experiences with ceasing to take gabapentin. Hopefully this information is helpful to others in my situation.

I had a two week vacation this year and decided, partially by accident, to stop taking gabapentin (Neurontin). I have been taking it for years for nerve pain and muscle spasm associated with syringomyelia. I knew coming off gabapentin would be disruptive to my life. It is an anti-seizure drug which can cause seizures if you discontinue it too quickly--even if you don't have epilepsy. At the dose I was taking this wasn't a big risk, but any time I've forgotten to take it I definitely get crabby and my muscles start tensing up.

Why Did I stop taking Neurontin

I'm not sure if it was helping anymore. When I first started taking it (300mg 3x/day), it helped considerably with muscle tightness and nerve pain. I could concentrate better because of the pain reduction. It is one of those drugs you get used to, though. After taking it for a few years, I wasn't sure if it was still helping, of if it just made me feel normal, and the withdrawals sucked.

I was concerned about side effects. I can always use better concentration and short term memory. I wanted to see if how my cognitive function fared without gabapentin. I also have other symptoms I wanted rule out as being caused by gabapentin. This is tricky as spinal cord disease pretty much causes symptoms all over (everything is connected to it). I wondered if things like irregular heartbeat, chest pain, rashes, mood swings, etc. were at all caused by the drug.

I am sick of the mood swings. Gabapentin really affects my mood. When it is time to take the next dose I'm often an asshole, despite my best efforts to be nice. Which is worse, the mood swings caused by taking gabapentin, or those caused by chronic and varying pain. We shall see.

How did I gently adjust to zero dosage?
I used lorazepam and occasional dexamethasone for a week or so. The hard part was after ceasing all of it.

How is it going so far?
It has been about three weeks without any gabapentin. Now that I'm taking nothing but vitamins and ibuprofen, I have to say it is pretty rough. Considering I usually feel like crap this is not a big adjustment, but some things are worse.
My mood is better at times, and worse at times. Yesterday I was not nice because I was miserable. Besides that I feel like my mood has been more stable. Less "4 pm asshole effect".
Muscle tightness is a bitch now. I thought it was bad before but my sholders and neck are so tight it is hard to turn my head.

What is next?
I'm going to try and hang tough for another month and a half, at which point I may try a lower dosage of gabapentin, or maybe some of the other related drugs such as Keppra (Levetiracetam). Meanwhile, I'll go for walks 3 times a day, and try to stretch and meditate. Leave a comment with any other good tips.

Chiari and Syringomyelia Handbook

The Chiari and Syringomyelia Foundation recently posted a very informative book on Chiari Malformation (CM) and Syringomyelia (SM). It is over 40 pages of writing by the best and brightest physicians on the subject. It includes pictures, and is a free download, or you can buy a printed copy for cheap. Thanks to Dr. Batzdorf and others who put this book together.

Chiari and Syringomyelia Handbook.

How to Add CSF Fundraising Button to your site/blog.

One easy way to help raise funds for Chiari and Syringomyelia research is to place this fund raising button on your website or blog.

All you have to do is post this HTML text in your site where you'd like the button to appear:

<a href="http://www.csfinfo.org/donation.php">
<img src="http://www.csfinfo.org/images/csf-button.gif"/></a>

If you have a blog here on blogger.com, follow these directions:

1. Log in and click on the Layout tab of your blog's dashboard.
2. Click Add a Page Element where you want to add the button.
3. Choose the HTML/Javascript option.
4. Copy and paste the above HTML into the content field and save it.

Any questions?

How chronic pain harms brain function

I ran into another interesting article on chronic pain today. Some researchers at Northwestern University used functional MRI scanning to show that brains of those with chronic back pain are stuck in a sort of full-throttle mode of operation, even for simple tasks.
Here's the wire story:

By Julie Steenhuysen Tue Feb 5, 5:50 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Brain scans of people in chronic pain show a state of constant activity in areas that should be at rest, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday, a finding that could help explain why pain patients have higher rates of depression, anxiety and other disorders.

They said chronic pain seems to alter the way people process information that is unrelated to pain.

"It seems that enduring pain for a long time affects brain function in response to even minimally demanding attention tasks completely unrelated to pain," the researchers wrote in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Continue reading on Yahoo News or, if you want to read the actual research paper, there is a PDF here:

Beyond Feeling: Chronic Pain Hurts the Brain, Disrupting
the Default-Mode Network Dynamics
Marwan N. Baliki,1 Paul Y. Geha,1 A. Vania Apkarian,1,2,3,4 and Dante R. Chialvo1