By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

We’ve reported several times about the abuse and lack of effectiveness of gabapentin, a nerve medication increasingly prescribed to treat fibromyalgia, neuropathy and other types of chronic pain.

It turns out gabapentin is also involved in a growing number of attempted suicides.

In a large new study published in the journal Clinical Toxicology, University of Pittsburgh researchers looked at over 90,000 calls involving medications to U.S. poison control centers. They found that calls about gabapentin and the muscle relaxant baclofen increased significantly just as opioid prescriptions began declining.

“Gabapentin and baclofen are two medications that have seen increased availability to patients as alternatives to opioids for the treatment of acute and chronic pain. With greater accessibility, poison center exposures have demonstrated a marked increase in toxic exposures to these two medications,” wrote lead author Kimberly Reynolds of the University of Pittsburgh.

“As poison center data do not represent the totality of cases in the United States, the steep upward trends in reported exposures reflect a much larger problem than the raw numbers would suggest.”

Between 2013 and 2017, calls involving the abuse and misuse of gabapentin went up nearly 120 percent, while reports of baclofen being abused or misused rose nearly 32 percent from 2014 to 2017.

Even more concerning is that calls about attempted suicides involving gabapentin rose 80 percent, while calls about attempted suicides with baclofen increased 43 percent. Co-ingestion of sedatives and opioids were common for both medications.

Only 19 deaths involving gabapentin were identified as possible suicides during the five-year study period, but there were thousands of gabapentin-related calls each year coded as attempted suicides — including over 10,000 calls in 2017 alone.