neurontin & cancer

Welcome to the Coping With Epilepsy Forums

Welcome to the Coping With Epilepsy forums - a peer support community for folks dealing (directly or indirectly) with seizure disorders. You can visit the forum page to see the list of forum nodes (categories/rooms) for topics.

Please have a look around and if you like what you see, please consider registering an account and joining the discussions. When you register an account and log in, you may enjoy additional benefits including no ads, access to members only (ie. private) forum nodes and more. Registering an account is free - you have nothing to lose!

Emee

Stalwart
Messages
232
Reaction score
5
Points
63
I've been taking Neurontin for partial seizures, nerve pain, & migraines for 20 years. Now I'm reading that it can cause cancer which is very disturbing to me. It has been the one meds I've taken that did not cause me serious side effects.

This may not be a subject I should bring up since we all must have our meds, but is this a typical warning for all seizure meds? I've been doing research for a couple days but can't come up with anything definite. We suffer enough without adding this concern. Thanks.
 
Are you sure? I know that Neurontin is used for cancer pain.

There have also been studies that say there is a pretty low likelihood of Neurontin causing cancer
The epidemiological data in a US cohort with up to 12 years of follow-up and a UK cohort with up to 15 years of follow-up do not support a carcinogenic effect of gabapentin use. However, the confidence intervals for some analyses were wide, and an important effect cannot be confidently excluded.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22144034
 
Emee, you need to understand how trials work to understand how these warnings find their way into the literature. If they are doing an FDA trial, they are required to report all that happens to the group. An FDA trial would consist of a good few thousand patients and be done over three or so years, after which about three more trials of similar length and size would need to be done before FDA approval. If, during the process, two of those patients in the trial get diagnosed with cancer, those incidents must be included in the data.

After the drug goes onto the market, the FDA carries on collecting data indefinitely. If only a few patients report that they were diagnosed with cancer while taking neurontin, it's a serious potential side effect and, with enough reports, they may put a black box warning on the package insert. There are no black box warnings for neurontin about cancer. They have done a cross section of trials to look at cancer risk and have found no evidence that neurontin actually causes cancer.

http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT01138124

"In a published case-control screening study of the association of gabapentin with 55 cancers, the only cancer that met the screening criteria for possibly increased cancer risk with gabapentin exposure was renal (including renal pelvis) cancer. This association was judged to be likely due to or substantially accentuated by confounding by cigarette smoking, hypertension, and lifestyle." That last conclusion wasn't just a guess or an educated opinion--it was put through a trial with a control group, too. So I would say it sounds pretty safe as far as cancer's concerned.
 
Thanks epileric & Kirsten, The article I read mentioned 10% of the people in the trial had developed colon cancer. They did say they couldn't be sure if the Gabapentin was the cause.

I feel better reading your info.
 
Emee, can you give us the link to the article? I'd like to have a look and see how they organised the trial. They usually offer links to those.
 
Kirsten, When I found it I was Googling Neurontin & colon cancer & it was in one of the articles. I usually save that type info but for some reason didn't this time.
 
I googled what you googled and found a couple of trial results. 37 people taking neurontin (0.11%) had Colon Cancer.

When the percentage includes everyone, whether they take neurontin or not, between 0.07% and 3.63% get colon cancer, so it would seem that those taking neurontin have the same colon cancer risk as those not taking neurontin. Journos and web writers often don't understand how to pull apart the numbers properly. The moment they see colon cancer patients in a trial, they write that the drug in question causes it, instead of looking comparatively at colon cancer in neurontin takers and colon cancer in all people. There can only be a suspicion that a drug causes a particular disease if its incidence is higher than that of those who don't take the drug.

Current Age 10 Years 20 Years 30 Years

30 0.07 0.32 0.98
40 0.25 0.92 2.10
50 0.69 1.91 3.54
60 1.32 3.08 4.39
70 2.08 3.63 N/A
 
Back
Top Bottom