Another known death was a 47-year-old woman who took 26 tablets of 600 mg gabapentin. However, while gabapentin alone rarely causes an overdose, the medication is increasingly implicated in overdose deaths. According to the CDC, gabapentin has been detected in nearly one out of 10 overdose deaths. Gabapentin Increasingly Implicated in Overdose DeathsJAMA. 2022 Jun 28;327 (24):2387. doi: 10.1001/jama.2022.10100. Women typically had higher rates of overdose deaths involving both opioids and gabapentinoids/Z-drugs, though this disparity disappeared in 2020. White Americans and American Indians/Alaskan Natives historically had higher rates than other racial groups; however, Black Americans experienced over 60% annual growth in recent years. Gabapentin-related* Non-Fatal Overdoses†† among Pennsylvania Residents, 2017-2020 *Overdose deaths that include Gabapentin as a cause of death on the death certificate, or that include Gabapentin on toxicology when the death certificate doesn’t list the drug(s) responsible for the overdose. Gabapentin detection and involvement in overdose deaths increased during 2019 and 2020, according to a study published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Gabapentin, an 4. Kuehn BM. Gabapentin increasingly implicated in overdose deaths. JAMA 2022;327:2387. 5. CDC Injury Center. Death Rate Maps & Graphs. Drug Overdose. 2022. Accessed July 19, 2022. trends in gabapentin detection and involvement in drug overdose deaths—23 States and the District of Columbia, 2019–2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022;71:664–6. These medications can cause lethargy or agitation in overdose, increase risk of death combined with opioids, and manifest a withdrawal syndrome. This topic will discuss the evaluation and management of gabapentinoid poisoning and withdrawal. A summary table to facilitate emergency management is provided (table 1). The finding that gabapentin detection and involvement in overdose deaths increased during 2019 to 2020 suggests the dangers of polysubstance use, particularly co-use of gabapentin and illicit opioids. The authors encourage educating persons who use illicit opioids with gabapentin about the increased risk for respiratory depression and death. The 239 deaths in 2022 represent a 10% increase from the 217 deaths in 2021. The rate of death in 2021 was 33.6 per 100,000 Vermonters while the rate for 2022 is 37.0 fatal overdoses per 100,000 Vermonters. These rates are statistically similar. Of note, the percent increase from 2021 to 2022 was less than that from 2020 to 2021 (10% versus 37%). Although this rate exceeds that expected in a healthy population matched for age and sex, it is within the range of estimates for the incidence of sudden unexplained deaths in patients with epilepsy not receiving gabapentin (ranging from 0.0005 for the general population of epileptics to 0.003 for a clinical trial population similar to that in In this study we examined deaths following gabapentinoid use in England reported to the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths. A total of 3051 deaths were reported (gabapentin: 913 cases; pregabalin: 2322 cases [both detected in 184 cases]). The percentage of deaths with gabapentin detected that were opioid-involved remained consistently high, ranging from 85% to 90%. Illicit opioid-involved deaths accounted for 56.8% of overdose deaths with gabapentin detected in the first quarter of 2019 and 69.2% in the last quarter of 2020; this increase was largely driven by illicitly manufactured fentanyl and fentanyl analogs. The percentage (A) Total number of deaths reported to NPSAD from England with gabapentin and/or pregabalin detected at postmortem. Further deaths occurring in 2020 are anticipated to be received (see Section 2.2). The secondary y‐axis shows the number of General Practitioner prescriptions for prescribed gabapentinoids in England by year. 26 Detection of deaths with (B) gabapentin and (C) pregabalin With great interest we read the article of Tardelli et al. about the perceived increase of overdose-deaths “due to” non-benzodiazepine hypnotics including gabapentinoids (GPT) over the last two decades extrapolated from USA National Center for Health Statistics data.1 We have not seen comparable phenomena in Germany, despite the highest Western-European rate of non-medical GPT-use.2 German The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved gabapentin for treating seizures and pain associated with shingles. But growing off-label prescribing of gabapentin for nerve pain and other conditions contributed to its prescription rate doubling from about 13 to 27 per 1000 insurance beneficiaries between 2009 and 2016. In cases in which gabapentin was determined to be a cause of death, the blood concentrations ranged from 1.1 to 134.0 mg/L. Persons who died of a gabapentin-related drug death were prescribed the drug legitimately 91.4% of the time, with 84.2% of those also having a known prior history of abuse or misuse of prescription medications. Routine gabapentin testing, as part of comprehensive postmortem toxicology testing protocols for drug overdose death investigations, could further elucidate its role in drug overdose deaths. Despite the lack of uniform testing, gabapentin detection and involvement in overdose deaths increased during 2019–2020. In Kentucky, gabapentin was listed as a contributing drug on the death certificate in 40% of the overdose deaths with gabapentin-positive toxicology; in North Carolina this percentage was 57%. Of these, gabapentin was found in 9.7%. Gabapentin was judged to contribute to overdose death in 52.3% of those deaths—or 5.0% of the total deaths from overdose. Individuals who died from a gabapentin-related overdose were most likely to be non-Hispanic white (83%), between the ages of 35 and 54 years (52%), with men and women equally affected. Prescription opioid use is highly associated with risk of opioid-related death, with 1 of every 550 chronic opioid users dying within approximately 2.5 years of their first opioid prescription. Although gabapentin is widely perceived as safe,
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